arithemin

[arithemin]

Anti-suicide frame A practical solution to avoid waste of material during those particular nights in which panic is likely to overcome self-preservation instinct. It provides also a very uncomfortable way to spend the whole night awake thinking and wondering what is going to happen in the morning.

[arithemin]

Advocate "I would like to stay here until you switch from being his advocate to being his executioner, but it has been two hours and I have more important things to do" Well, a common drawback with leaving the hero alone in the deadly machine you have planned for him: he is likely to get out of it. After three or four hours of desperate struggling under a burning sun, the 'advocate' boy finds the courage to get into the only, risky and doubtful, way to save both of them. He gets slowly on his kneels paying attention to not break the neck of his beloved hanging boy. Their wrists are securely tied up behind their backs, so, in the following anxious seconds, he is going to use his teeth to loose the ropes at the wrists of the hanging boy before he suffocates in the noose. Than he is going to hold again the hanging boy as before, but now the hanging boy is able to free his own neck from the noose. The no-longer-hanging boy jumps down, looses the ropes at the wrists of his saviour and both run for the hills before their captors come back to kill them in a more practical and certain way. I don't know whether the hanging boy is the other one's younger brother or lover, anyhow their hug at the end of the run is going to be extremely sweet :3

[arithemin]

Riding Prince Indeed this young noble gets relly bored when he has to spend the whole summer in the countryside palace along with his family, although he would prefer to stay in the city, he manages to find new ways to have fun also there. On the other hand, it is in this poor servant's interest to keep his young lord happy and amused, he knows that this exhausting and humiliating riding is still much better than what would happen if he gets bored, despite spurs and riding whip...

[arithemin]

Another two casual slaveboys about to be sold, there were a lot of them in past millennia, thus it seems legit to me to keep drawing them.

[arithemin]

Wagon After two miles like this they can be sure the peasant has learned some humility, but also that the next village, four miles further on, won't be reached before noon. A mule would have been faster, and would have endured better the whip.

[arithemin]

Iron Branding Sacrament "Look at me, and it won't hurt too much", or something like this.

[arithemin]

Enslaved Tuffnut 

From riding fiercely dragons to rowing on a galley under a boiling southern sun, a barbarian's life can be unpredictable. Notes: I know Vikings and Romans do not overlap chronologically, but I was already in the middle of drawing the legionary when I realized that. The term "barbarian" is just from a relative Roman/Greek perspective.

[arithemin]

After the slave boy tried to escape again, the master decided to brand him with red hot irons, impressing his whole name on the boy's chest, a lot of letters...

[arithemin]

Hiro Tadashi

Sometimes elder brothers can be excessively bossy and bully, but more likely that little brat deserved a special nasty punishment for disobeying again...

[arithemin]

Box centipede The first hour in the wooden box was a torment: gasping, heat, sweat, thirst, ache, cramps. After few hours the boy stopped struggling and remained motionless and stunned, almost passed out, weak and hopeless. The bored dungeon guys decided to give him some friends to wake him up and keep him company. The poor boy is scared to death of such animals, and he is right, their venomous bite is extremely painful, he starts begging and crying in panic when the first one starts crawling on his arm, and the second one on his leg, while the dungeon guys are having fun watching the scene. Don't worry, five or six pairs of biting forcipules are not sufficient to kill him, probably.

[arithemin]

Little River

This is how they should have tied that rebel savage boy to a post. I featured the whipping soldier on another image found on the Internet to be sure about anatomy.  

[arithemin]

Cross Just a sketch After a few hours his arms, shoulders, neck and wrists are aching more and more, he is sweating and water loss is causing thirst and weakness... How much longer? Will he pass out before the punishment is over? 

[arithemin]

Of course force and weapons are necessary to ensure that rules are observed, safety guaranteed and stability preserved.

[arithemin]

Foot washing. Identical scenes probably happened somewhere in history, it looks like a perfectly fitting task for a domestic slaveboy.

[arithemin]

Roman Whipping yard. I still have to decide what this Roman slave (pedisĕquus, fāmulus, servus, mancipium; probably more)* boy did to deserve a whipping. Romans used differend kinds of cane, whip, flog (ferula, virga, corrigia, verber, habena, scutica, flagellum; probably more)* depending on the gravity of the offence and/or on the master (dominus) mood... *It's funny how few millennia of slave holding society make you invent and accumulate a lot of specific terminology.

[arithemin]

Just a sketch of young suffering prisoners

[arithemin]

This dungeon is quite crowded, the young prisoner on the left is awfully scared from wandering when it will come his turn to be branding tortured like his friend on the right. This kind of torment is very painful, the boy has endured eight kisses of the red hot iron, having started crying after the third one. As fas as the figure on the wooden cross, I remember I took inspiration from another image found on the Internet, it was truly evocative.