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1
ARIELLA
When I was younger, I considered myself untouchable. My father told me to remember my place in the world, before somebody more powerful than me reminded me of it. I can still hear echoes of his voice when I gaze around me, or during moments where I’m allowed to sleep.
I miss him greatly.
Once more, I kick back the rodan, which bites and gnaws at my ankles, emerging from the hay beneath me and from the corners of isolated and abandoned market stalls. For five years, I have been relegated to living among the taura and equu, viewed as livestock. I have been punished both for my insolence, and more often, for existing.
My captors nudge a bowl of sweetgrass and raw somanas in my direction, telling me to eat. It is not food intended for humans, and tastes more like a bitter prairie or a feed trough, but it would nourish me.
But to take their feed is to comply with my fate. Perhaps, if I resist, I can stall this out a little longer. For what, I am uncertain.
“Fifteen mena for this lovely specimen before you!” the dark elf cries out, before a roaring crowd of elves. A woman stands before them on an auction block, hair disheveled and eyes hollow. She is nude, and her breasts are tender and heavy, chains rattling with her every rare movement.
She is me in five minutes if I am not able to free myself. Five years, I have been chained up, bound to the whims of my sadistic captors. I am not sure where I would run to or how I would escape, but I have never given up hope.
“Eat your food!” one of the dark elves responsible for my imprisonment yells, whipping my bare ass.
I cry out in pain but knock over my bowl in defiance, the rodan racing to devour the scraps. They chew into it with their enormous teeth, then run away with the morsels, pink tails scurrying into obscurity.
“Twenty mena!” an elderly elf with distant silver eyes and patchy hair cries out. His belly is generously proportioned, bulging out.
“Twenty-five mena!” a sleek-haired, towering dark elf says, arrogance drizzling through his voice.
“Do you think if you don’t eat, you’ll spare yourself from the auction block?” one of my captors asks. “You’ve only made it more difficult for yourself. Now you’ll go hungry!”
A hardy-looking dark elf clad in plate roams mere feet before my stable, accompanied by a pack of hungry-looking worg. As they snarl and leap in my direction, their master holds them back.
“Is this one giving you trouble?” he asks my captors, noticing the general discontentment.
I am the only one here not cooperating.
He stares at me, smiling viciously.
“You know, I can let them go,” he says. “I’ve been starving Elem for just such an occasion. You are a valuable piece of property, but you’d fetch a fine price as worg meat.”
He laughs, as the worg continue to snap at me. My heart surges as they leap ever closer.
“Enough kidding around, Altrius,” one of my captors says. “You’re being paid to keep watch, not to play pranks.”
The other women in the stalls with me tremble with fear, knowing that should he let loose the worg, they would be devoured too.
“I just hope this one learns her lesson soon,” he says. “Would hate to have another accident on my conscience.”
He walks away with his worg in tow, who all snap back at me as he leaves but follow and obey when they are out of my range.
For some reason, beasts love me especially.
“Thirty mena to the gentleman in the blue tunic!” the auctioneer bellows out.
The crowd claps cordially. As they do, the man in front of me keels over, seizing on the ground. The sweetgrass in his mouth spills out with foam, and as I regard him in horror, my captors all chuckle.
“Must have gotten into some of the poison,” one of them says. “No matter. He was close to expiring anyway.”
He stops moving, and the rodan returns, gnawing at the sweetgrass and at strands of his grizzled hair. I am led forward by my chains behind a small, fattened dark elf, realizing with apprehension that I am next in queue.
“The worgs are going to eat well today,” another one of my captors observes, looking over the corpse on the stable floor.
