In Tales Hyperborean Book 6, Gerard gets to visit a slave breeding pit in Ebugal. Breeding pits are too big to deal with within the confines of the story, so they got themselves an article.
Origin of the Breeding Pits - Shub Niggurath Worship
Dark Young, Picture credit Unknown
Shub Niggurath is the Outer God of fertility. She spits out creatures known as the Dark Young, which she then consumes. Those that escape from her though grow into giant, tree-like beasts with hoofed legs and a crown of huge tentacles. Wherever she or they go, life springs.
Shub Niggurath is worshiped all over Hyperborea by farmers and breeders. She is (as far as humans know) neutral in the war of the gods, and all seek her favor.
Breeding pits evolved in the deep, ancient history of Hyperborea, estimated by Shemite priest-viziers to predate the arrival of the first Shemite priest kings in Hyperborea, 20,000 years before Gerard's arrival. The pits evolved from ancient Shub Niggurath worship and the post conquest/slave capture rituals of her followers. In ‘deep woodlands under the darkest of the moon’ (HPL), a victim would be sacrificed on a stone altar to her. This would draw the Dark Young out of the old forests, who would then consume the victim.
Slave girls (taken in war, or shed by Landing Beasts) would be kept in pits around the altar. These pits would be protected by overhead, criss-crossing bars to keep the Dark Young from eating the slaves as well.
After the worship ritual, these slaves would be made to drink a potion made from the milk of the Dark Young. This potion renders slave girls immediately fertile and ready to breed.
Over time the pits became permanently occupied and towns and villages formed around them. The essential layouts of the pits would remain, and new pits would be added around the initial ones as the settlement grew. The pits are commonly linked together by underground train systems, and made accessible by cell doors for ease of access.
Dark Trees
Strange, leafless, black trees would begin growing at the sites: these are subterranean creatures related to the Dark Young, with roots going down quite deep. Whether they are multiple creatures or all extrusions coming from one, is unclear, as it is sacrilegious to excavate them. These trees are fed blood and tapped for their sap, which has fertility powers similar to that of Dark Young milk.
Breeding Pits and Hyperborean Cities
The Power of City Elites
The power of a town or city comes from its population. The bigger a Hyperborean settlement, the more it offers in terms of tax base, conscription, desperate colonists to fling at cosmic god-scorched lands, and the free and endless supply of slaves (see below).
However, cities in Hyperborea (as were all cities until the 20th century) are ad hoc death camps. Cramped and filthy, they are rampant with disease. Those miserable enough to be living there tend to have poor nutrition, high infant mortality, and poor life expectancy. The net population growth of these settlements is negative: they need constant replenishment.
Some city dwellers buy and adopt slave-born infants from farmers, so they may better play the odds against infant mortality. However, they will only ever adopt 2 to 3 children, and never at the scales that the city elites would like them to. Further, artisans and professionals in Hyperborean cities have no real interest in adopting infants. They would rather put that money towards buying lovely slaves girl to serve in their kitchens and beds.
To solve this, city and royal elites came up with a now widely practiced solution, to maintain and grow their power by keeping Hyperborea's settlements artificially teeming.
The Slum and Breeding Pit System
Even among the free, Hyperborean society is highly stratified. In every town there is a significant sized class of poor slum dwellers.
Slave-born infants from the city breeding pit are given to these slum dwellers who receive a grain stipend for each infant they adopt. This is an attractive bonus: slum dwellers with large families enjoy a higher caloric intake than those who choose not to adopt.
However, grain is not all a child needs. Large slum families go to suffer even greater poverty, and there are no meaningful opportunities in the city slums. In order to leave the slums (which are walled off) slum dwellers must pay a fee. Most, however, cannot pay it. This condemns them to remain within their slum district walls, essentially a captive population.
Slum dwellers are taxed annually: those in arrears for taxes are noted. When the town satrap decides more troops or slaves are needed, he sends in the city guard. From the pool of debtors, sons are conscripted to become spearmen and archers for local or royal armies, and the daughters are enslaved. These seizures are carefully managed to help maintain the fiction that the system is not rigged, and that if those in the slums only worked hard enough, they would succeed…
Most of the females seized by the town will spend some time in its breeding pits. The infants born of the slaves are given to slum dwellers, and the cycle repeats. The bred slaves are then released back to the city's stock (to do municipal tasks, or be sold at the slave market for the city’s financial gain). However, if a slave girl is deemed an exceptional example, she will be kept in the pits and bred again. And again.
Master Breeders and ‘Special Breeds’
In most settlements, the breeding pits are controlled by semi-independent, master breeders who are part priest, part public servant (which is arguably the lot of most public servants on Hyperborea). These master breeders mostly see that the sites are well watered with (mostly) animal blood, and that the tapping of Dark Tree sap is managed (Dark Young do not come to sites that have become settlements). They are given responsibility for the towns breeding pit targets and usually have one or two "special breeds" that they and the master breeders before them, have been developing over centuries or even millennia.
The offspring of special breed slaves are carefully tracked in later life and invited back (or captured) to mate with the original stock and cement the bloodlines. Special breed slaves are typically females with a distinctive physical characteristic deemed valuable (large breasts on otherwise slender bodies, breasts that produce high amounts of milk) or give birth to unusually large, strong, or fierce men. Such "warrior breeds" often form the elite bodyguard of a satrap or priest king, and are presented as their superhuman symbols and regents to the general population.
The Life of a Breeding Pit Slave Girl
Any slave girl owned by the city may be rotated in to serve in the city’s breeding pit. There she will be packed into a pit with other slaves, while men selected to do the breeding assess her. If selected, the slave girl is dragged to a different pit where she will be put on her hands and knees, her wrists and ankles chained to metal rings set in the ground. Fertility runes will be painted on her back and crotch, and a prayer recited to Shub Niggurath. Then the breeding man will enter, and force her to drink a potion called the “milk of Shub Niggurath;" a purple blend of fermented goats’ milk and Dark Tree sap.
One drop of the sap is enough to render the slave immediately fertile, and guarantees she will be impregnated.
Two drops of the sap makes the slave hyper-fertile and birth quadruplets or quintuplets, but her life expectancy will drop sharply (this is rarely seen as a problem by breeders, given that most Hyperborean slave girls are culled on reaching middle-age).
If given three drops, she will mutate. This is never done except to give thanks to Shub Niggurath - or to make an example of a slave to the others.
After breeding, the slave girl is returned to her normal tasks. When she can no longer work she will be sent to a nursery, where she will remain until after birthing and the infants separated from her. The slave then goes back to normal rotation, unless she has been flagged as high-value by the master breeder. If so, she is returned to the breeding pits for more breeding.
Shang and Bharaji slave girls are preferred in the pits: this is because they are designed humans from the far future, genetically engineered for toughness and high immunity. This makes them excellent for breeding.
Outer Mutant Transformation: Gofnn Hupadgh
Gofnn Hupadgh Picture Credit Unknown
Rapid, high intensity breeding does great damage to a slaves’ health. After four or five such breedings, she becomes too weak. At this point, her life will end in three ways:
1 - she is slaughtered and her blood used to water the Black Trees of the breeding pit. Fertility in the pits will briefly rise. This is the fate of most such unfortunates.
2 - she is made into a trophy. As above, but her skull will be taken and her breeding history carved into it. This is usually the fate of special breed girls; their skulls are not only a physical record but a trophy of the master breeders success.
3 - she is given three drops of Shub Niggurath’s milk to transform her into a Gofnn Hupadgh, an Outer Mutant. Outer mutants can be satyr-like beasts, but no two are the same. They often sport fangs, claws, and hooves but not in any pattern that makes sense to the normal human mind. They are functionally immortal (though they can be slain).
These Outer Mutants are kept in cells in a lower, catacomb level of the pits, where the trophy skulls are stored and the Shub Niggurath milk produced. This catacomb is holy ground: it can only be accessed by the master breeder and high-ranking worshipers.
The Men who Get to Breed
The highest preference is given to outsiders: wandering strangers from distant lands are coveted: the more distant and alien, the better. Regardless of whatever local prejudices may exist, master breeders understand objectively that a mixed gene pool means improved health.
Second preference is given to warriors, trappers, and bounty hunters: men living dangerous lives who by necessity need to be in good physical condition. This is taken as (limited) indicator of their fitness to breed.
The last preference goes to those in power. The town elites are not above visiting the breeding pits for the sheer delight of breeding beautiful young slave girls. The master breeder must balance both his professional and spiritual integrity, with the political expedience of being semi-beholden to such people.
Book 6 of the Hyperborea details deals with Gerard to visit to a breeding pit. Follow the link below to get the first book in the series, absolutely free and with no obligation :-).
Enjoy!
Alice, Tormentor of Eager, Lovely, Slave Girls