My Taboo Harem!

A few unknown hours ago—

The night had painted the world in a dark, impenetrable shroud like a vast burial cloth spread over the city and its sins. Only the city lights resisted at first, glittering in proud little clusters as if they could challenge the dominion of darkness, but even they eventually gave up their reach, shrinking into helpless islands of gold beneath the swallowing black.

From afar, peace would have looked easy.

The world of ordinary souls had stepped quietly into rest, warm meals, soft beds, lovers, sleep, and all the mundane mercies in between. It all looked perfect.

But like the city itself, the night had long since learned how to lie beautifully.

It hid rot the way perfume hid blood and monsters beneath ceilings, under family names, behind silk smiles, inside well-lit mansions and sacred bloodlines.

And as always, the poorest souls suffered the most.

Deep beneath all that civilized perfection, in a stony cave old enough to have forgotten sunlight, suffering waited in chains.

The place looked less like a prison and more like an ancient execution site abandoned by gods and later reclaimed by men crueler than gods.

The cave walls were black stone veined with a dull metallic sheen, as though iron had grown naturally through the rock and then died there. Jagged pillars rose from the ground like broken fangs. Massive chains thicker than a man’s arm were hammered directly into the walls, the ceiling, the floor, and the stone columns, each link inscribed with narrow glowing runes that pulsed faintly in sickly gold and ash-grey.

Those inscriptions were not elegant decoration, more like old restraint-scriptures.

Suppression verses, sealing formation and punishment arrays.

They had been woven so deep into the metal that the chains looked less forged and more cursed into existence. Every link held a different command. Obey. Kneel. Bleed. Silence. Return. Endure. Do not die.

The last one was carved more often than the rest.

Cruelty, when properly funded, always remembered to prevent escape.

Here and there, bronze spikes had been driven through the rock, each wrapped in threadlike seals and crystal studs. Heavy rings of ancient metal lay bolted into the ground. Some stones bore geometric carvings and concentric circles as if the cave had once been part temple, part sacrificial pit, part laboratory for whatever civilization had first decided the suffering of extraordinary beings required extraordinary craftsmanship.

But the worst thing about the cave was not the chains.

It was time!

Time did not behave normally here, it crawled when mercy was needed, sprinted when recovery might have mattered and bent itself around torment like a loyal dog trained by monsters with clean hands.

The cave had been built inside a folded temporal pocket, a punishment chamber where an hour outside could become a day within, or two days, or seven, depending on how generous the tormentors felt.

The decision could be adjusted from outside through the golden crystals embedded in the walls. The victim would remain here for "a few hours" in the world above while inside the stone womb, the suffering stretched long enough for skin to split, heal, split again, and remember each wound separately.

The array did not merely slow or quicken time.

It rationed despair.

Layered wards slept inside the stone, seals coiled behind the runes. Hidden retaliation scripts waited for any attempt at intrusion, rescue, teleportation, soul slipping, curse inversion, divine sensing, or death.

Especially death.

If the prisoner’s soul attempted to flee, the cave would drag it back into the body and restart the punishment cycle.

Very thoughtful.

Very holy.

This place had been made to break something divine and keep it aware while breaking.

From the farthest corner of the cavern came a sound.

A soft sniff, then a small hitch of breath, beautiful, even now.

The sound belonged to a woman whose voice should have been used for hymns, blessings, lullabies, and prayers heard at the edge of heaven. Instead, it carried sadness, exhaustion, pain, and that peculiar kind of tiredness that did not come from one beating or one bad day, but from suffering repeated too many times to count.

Across the cold stone floor the chains stretched, clinking faintly whenever their prisoner moved, their glowing inscriptions slithering like dead light along the links until they vanished into the darkness.

And there she was:

Anahita.

The Fallen Angel sat huddled in the corner, her knees drawn up, her forehead resting weakly against them, her arms wrapped around her legs in the posture of someone trying to make herself smaller than pain. Her wings were gone, sealed so completely inside her that their absence looked like mutilation.

The space behind her shoulders seemed wrong without them, empty in a way the eyes could feel.

A fallen angel with her wings sealed without her concert was not merely less beautiful.

She looked unfinished, reduced and mocked by the shape of what should have been there.

Her hair, once a thing of angelic beauty, was now white only in name. Dirt had dulled it, sweat had plastered strands to her face and neck. Blood, hers, had dried in her hairline, smeared at her temple, and darkened in clotted streaks through the pale mess of it. Some strands stuck to the still-healing cuts along her scalp.

Others trembled each time her body shivered.

The wounds littering her body were at different stages of healing, which somehow made the sight worse. It meant this was not fresh cruelty alone. It was old cruelty layered upon new. It meant she had been here long enough for her angelic body to attempt recovery, only for the cave, the chains, or whoever had held the scourge to patiently ruin the effort.

Tonight, instead of the graceful bearing that once made her look like a fallen star wrapped in sorrow, she was dressed in a robe so coarse and dirty it looked stolen from a slave pit in some ancient imperial arena.

It hung loose and ugly around her body, but not enough to conceal anything that mattered.

The back had been torn open deeply, either by force or for convenience, exposing the flesh beneath.

Her back was a map of punishment.

Long welts, deep gashes, reopened scars, and still-healing lines crossed her skin in merciless patterns, as though someone had taken a barbed scourge, a whip threaded with hooked blades and short razors, and taught it her name stroke by stroke. Some wounds had already sealed over into pink ridges.

Others still gaped wet and red while others had been cut over earlier scars, reopening old pain with surgical spite.

A draft moved through the cave, it touched one open line across her shoulder blade.

Anahita sucked in a sharp breath and folded tighter into herself.

The movement woke the chains, the crystals along them glowed brighter.

Gold light crawled up the links.

The collar around her neck hummed.

Anahita froze immediately.

Not because she was calm.

Because terror had trained her body faster than thought.

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A/N: The description took really long but I wanted you guys to see how much Anahita has been through over the course of year. I hope you give me a review on this.