Closed A Nightmare From Which We are Trying to Awake

[Aramenta]

Early Evening, Spring 53, 513 AV
The Sea of Grass, Northeast of Riverfall
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She rolled the name around her mind as she rode. Vanator Denusk. Vanator Denusk. She felt the name on her tongue. A strange name to her, the rough burr of the 'R', the smooth, vibrational cicada leg of the 'V'. She mouthed the word, in the absent way of a tired child. She was not in love with him, she was old enough to know that. Just the sort of glow of being very close to someone far one's superior, it was the sort of absent awe that was easy to confuse for desire, no different when she'd watched an Ankal wedding once, and wished she were the bride.

Syna rested heavily on the far, green, horizon, plump and rich and red-beautiful. And Ara, looking across the grass toward it, felt a gnawing enter her heart. It was getting late. She should be back soon. She should not be here alone. She frowned, and peered about her. She felt a thirst in her to close her eyes and feel the web, tug gently on the tattered weave work here, and feel how close she was to the camp. She should not have accepted when they offered to let her scout. She was not ready for this.

She squeezed her knees on Canter's flanks gently, and the horse snorted and sped up into a trot. Minnie, looked about her. The grass… she had grown up in it. It was home to her. And yet, it had never looked so threatening as it did now. Syna seemed to be calling to her, urging her forward, but she could not touch her. Semele, beneath her, pressed against her strider's feet, and yet even that force felt distant. Broken to her, for the moment. She had made a mistake. The universe would not forgive that easily. She should not have agreed.

She heard the hiss of the grass behind her and turned with a start - no. It was not a living thing, just the wind, the wind coming, urging her on as well. Go home, quickly, girl, the world cried to her. She worried... and yet! That one voice had called so hard to her, to go out, to serve, to be the tool of her people. To please the webbing master. To serve. To give. And still it murmured in her head. You have done right. You have done well. She had not felt arrogant, she had not... felt like herself at all, but felt simply, in that moment when she set out to scout in the morning, as if she were not a person, but simply a piece of a greater body. A member of the team.

She leaned in close to Canter's ears, "You smell something, Sister? Feel anything?"

Canter sniffed, nervously. Canter could not feel much better than her, now, for the webbing here was torn and frayed, so lose that even Canter's gate was muffled and slowed. If she only knew how far it was!

And at last, terrified, she closed her eyes, and fell into the web, laying her body limp and helpless against her Strider's neck. And with frightened lips, her web song sang out from her into the invisible, her fingers driving quick and deep into the wind-whipped strands of Djed.

But in the world, none of this, in the world, only a girl, very small, very alone, lying across her horse's neck, prone and slack, Her windmark peeking up above the collar of her shirt, licking black flames...x

[Irriari]

Irriari scanned the grasslands as the thermals carried her through the darkening sky. The winds made flying leisurely, so she paid particular attention to the flora and fauna below. The thick grasses hid more than they revealed, but years of living in Cyphrus had taught Irriari the tricks of spotting game. Shadows were darker as the sun set, and even the quickest rabbit couldn't conceal the dark silhouette it left against the earth.

As she flew forward, the zith found herself thinking about the dark events that had occurred seasons before in the grasslands. Her hands shook violently, and the zith bit her lip until it bled. No amount of pain could erase the rape from her memory. Similarly, no amount of bloodshed could repay the debt that Vanator owed to her. She found herself dreaming of killing him every so often, but no death was violent enough to satiate the beast that the drykas had created. Coming back to the lands of the drykas was her catharsis, and Irriari had spent the last six days hunting and searching for the man who had defiled her. The zith knew she couldn't stay much longer- her supplies were dwindling quickly and she needed to go back to Ravok.

The zith shook her head, anxious to be rid of the thoughts of Vanator. The elders would have skinned her if they had noticed her flying without purpose as she had been doing for the last two bells. Even worse, Irriari had drifted off into her thoughts and had completely disregarded the grasses below. She could almost hear Chaotic swearing at her and wishing that an arrow would pierce her wings. No such retribution came.

Gazing down once more, Irriari was surprised to see the form of a horse to her right. The horse was at the edge of her vision, and it would take a few chimes to reach it. The zith pumped her wings faster, eager to reach the human that was stupid enough to ride in the grasslands as the sun set. Perhaps they were simply bold, as Vanator had been.

Soon, the zith found herself flying directly overhead of the horse. Its rider was prone on the mares back. Irriari could hardly believe a human would be stupid enough to sleep on horseback, but humans always did their level best to achieve new levels of idiocy. Perhaps she would carve a medal into this girls back, as a reminder of the dangers that Cyphrus held. Irriari flew downwards as quickly as her wings would allow and landed next to the girl. The horse was obviously spooked by her presence and tried to bolt. Irriari ignoring the hideous creature and yanked the girl off with one clawed hand wrapped in the girls auburn hair. The other arm was placed under her legs, as a means to unceremoniously direct to her to the ground. When her prey was a foot above the ground, Irriari dropped her, smiling at the satisfying thump.

She waited until the drykas girl came to her senses before speaking,

“Hello, angel. You and I are going to have fun. If you scream, I'll kill you. If you don't, I'll let you live. Easy, right? However, I have a few questions for you before I let you go. While I would love to know why the drykas would let a girl as pretty as you wander out here alone, I'll chalk that up to human stupidity and save you some time. I would much rather know if you know of a man named Vanator.”

The zith laughed, pleased to have finally found some action to flavor her time in Cyphrus.

[Aramenta]

The web was filled with empty branches, she groped her voice forward upon it, singing a low, keening fear-song. The rope broke. Almost instinctually she started to fix it, then stopped - no, look for danger first. She started to feel around... she was in the wrong place. This was the wrong place. She had not ridden through something this shattered on her way out. She felt a rushing to her, a feeling as if the web... was moving faster...

And she jerked awake - she WAS rushing, Canter at a full gallop, and her hand red and sore - canter had turned around and bitten her to wake her.

"What is it! What is it!" she leaned her voice in to whisper in the horse's ear, and looked aroudn her frantically, and saw a mass of dark hurtling towards her.

I can't get away... I can't get away... let go, let go, if you're going to fall don't take your strider with you--

She had loosened her grip, and Canter whinnied wildly, her eyes rolling her legs thrown forward with all the force they could manage. And then... Canter was gone, and she had a sharp pain in her whiplashed neck, as if she'd been thrown off the horse by a cudgel blow. IT was only then she realized she was flying. Her eyes were too wild and confused, and her mind retreated into more primal sense. The warm, carnivore smell of flesh-eater sweat, of hair soaked by water vapor, of the slight foulness of digestion in the creatures breath. The hardness of muscles, and the strange, discontiguous softness of a belly and a breast. The keening of wind in her ears, and of the whip of wings around her.

And then, just as she gathered her breath, a release, a smack of flesh on grassy-stoned earth, and the breath was knocked back out.

It was a woman, a Zith - the first time she'd seen one, really. Her mind, knocked aside by panic, tried to scrabble for control, for an intelligent way of dealing with her situation. It managed to encourage her to put her hands up and on either side of her and lie very, very still, keeping well away from the axe at her belt.

And there reason stopped, and fear took over, and fear grew and swelled until it was so large it left her small and delirious. She lost direction, and her mind galloped. She noticed irrelevant things. The direction of the wind, the distant whinny of her horse, clack-clack of cicadas. How human this creature looked. That struck her. It made it worse. A monster over her, that would be terrible, but it would be approachable, it would be comprehensible. A slathering, heavy-jowled brute with hanks of ragged hair, and piggish eyes and animal skin. Something that felt inherently beastlike. You can understand an animal. This woman had a touch of feral, but it was sharpened, made more savage by the fact that... yes, she was a woman, not a Zith, in the abstract, but a woman, an individual, a soul. To be hold down and gloated over by another soul, to have your own existence inspire not hunger, or instinct, but real, reasonable, visceral hatred - that was worse, ever so much worse. Ara, for the first time, felt an unhelpful clarity enter her mind: she would never, ever, ever be a warrior. This feeling, of having sentient eyes bore into you with hatred. It was too large for her.

The screed the woman spit out above her was not in the horsewoman's own tongue, and she struggled stupidly just to pick out the words. She caught the gist. An insult, something about her looks - and she found her mind gnawing at this, the strangeness of it pulling the undisciplined thread of her mind aside to consider how strange it was that they had both looked at teach other and seen the same thing - how the other looked pretty - for in a mind bending whirl, Ara realized that was part of it, that the woman's fierce face and strange skin, and even the thing down of her body was not ugly. Not that there was any hormonal response to this, simply the aesthetic knowledge that she was goign to be killed by something that had a sort of queer beauty. She did not like this, she tried to spit it out of her mind. It was hard, to think of the way to use her fear, this way.

But the mention of Vanator, that was clear. The Denusk man? She lay very still, supine, still, her face losing track of the possibility of anger or cunning, swallowed, simply, by submissive, obedient fear. No. She would never be a warrior.

She signed a yes, helplessly in Pavi, looking up at the standing woman. No! She wouldn't know... who would ever teach her the tongue of ARa's people? Common... should Ara stand? No, she could not, she'd be a threat then.

She pushed as hard as she could, the voice out her throat, sawing queerly through the broken organ of her windpipe, finding only the faintest purchase. She said, "Yes," and at that volume it was struggle enoguh to say that. But all that came out was the palest, weakest of hoarse, grating squeals. She tried again, the sound of her broken throat obvious in her voice, and it threw her into a coughing fit, that, with the abuse to her diaphraghm, doubled her over hacking loudly, balling up involuntarily, an irresistible attack on her plans of silence and stillness. The cough gripped her hard, and she finally coughed up a little ball of mucus, pink traceries of thin blood in it. She heaved then for breath looking up in terror again at the woman who towered over her.

x

[Irriari]

Irriari laughed at the wide eyed girl as she tugged on the braided hair that had fallen away from its bindings to frame her face. Each movement the girl made was tempered by the fear she was feeling. The zith inhaled deeply, reveling in the sweat that rolled off of the sun-kissed skin that quivered beneath her claws. Smiling, Irriari imagined the girl as a slave. Her delicate muscles would grow as she was worked to the point of exhaustion, and her beautiful windmark would be cut off with a knife. Each day would start at dawn and end twelve bells after dusk, until the harsh schedule pulled the girl into delirium. While the zith hadn't broken a strong willed slave in ages, she had no doubt the drykas girl could be cowed within a season.

Irriari allowed the thought to fade away, knowing that such a dream would kill any chances of baiting Vanator into attacking her. Revenge was far more important than her desire to own a slave. Even if it meant that she would die, Irriari sought nothing more than to destroy Vanator for what he had done.

Overwhelmed with her luck, Irriari assessed the girl far more intently than she had before. The timid, pained affirmation made Irriari's dream all the more real. Plans blossomed in her minds eye as she continued to pull at the auburn hair wrapped around her fist.The girl would have to be sufficiently scared so that she would warn Vanator. Still, there was a fine line to be walked. If she maimed the drykas badly, the girl might not ever reach her destination. Irriari snarled at the limitation, and released the girls hair before moving to sit on girls upper thighs. From this position, no amount of squirming would throw the zith, and she was free to interrogate and toy with her victim. Irriari feigned surprise at the girls answer.

“I'm surprised you would interact with a rapist, little dove. Maybe he wants to bed you as he did with me. Maybe I'll hurt you so badly that he'll never get the chance.”

The zith spoke with candid happiness, knowing that the change in tone tended to unnerve victims.

“I don't really have a plan, you see. I hardly ever do. I just hurt you. I want to see how much you can take. I want you to cry and beg and scream until you can't anymore. And then, when you think it's all over and I couldn't possibly put you through anymore, we'll go for round two. After all, I doubt you would stop at round two, as humans rarely do. I'm simply giving you a taste of your own medicine.”

With that, Irriari grabbed the side of the girls face and pressed it into the grass and earth, holding her there as she taunted the girl.

“How does that sound to you, little dove? Sing for me. I want to hear you beg.”

[Aramenta]

If there is anything to make it harder to comprehend a tongue you do not speak well, it is fear. Fear awakens the muscles, it sharpens the instincts of flight, perhaps. But it does not make the reason quick or the memory adept. She picked words out of the sentences, and struggled to make sense of them. Rape, bed, hurt you badly, but they sounded wrong. Confusing. Was it even possible? Could that work if she was... no, she was... not talking... she receded, her breath coming in the short shallow breaths of an almost orgasmic fear, now, the surfaces of her skin cold and clammy, her body paralyzed.

The clever wordplay of the rest was lost, but the intent was not. Pain. Pain, screaming, attack, hurt. the woman's knees were heavy on Ara's thighs, and she thought of the mention of rape again, and her eyes turned up pleadingly, terrified.

//No. No. You must lie still. This is not so different - you are the medium, you are the tool of some purpose. You must serve your purpose, give her what she wants. Sate her need to hurt, so that she will be done with you.//

Ara's face was pushed hard against the grass, and her hips bucked a moment, involuntarily, trying to escape. 'And for the first time, she found her courage. Not the courage of the warrior, she had sought that and found it lacking. But the courage of the submitting. She closed her eyes, and stilled her body. She asked me to speak, to sing, to sing.

She tried to push the voice out of her htroat, but it was too dry, and so she didn't work to make it loud again. She turned begging eyes up at the woman, pleading with her to understand, this was all she could do. She whispered the song, no tonality to it here, for the voice was too broken slowly, so as not to seem a threat, she pointed to her throat with her fire-scarred hand, and whispered on.

"Honey gotta walk on,
Honey gotta walk on,
Mama came one day, but the day done gone.

Honey gotta walk on,
Honey gotta walk on,
And wait for the morning come.

Honey gotta sit hushed,
Honey gotta sit hushed,
Don't you hate nobody, you can manage to love,

Honey gotta sit hushed,
Honey gotta sit hushed,
And wait for the morning come."

The words traced over her lips. But even the closeness of their juxtaposition, they would be inaudible to any but a superhuman ear. And she sang them in the Pavi tongue. She knew no song in Common. Then she tried, a clumsy plea in Common-tongue.

"Please... please... no hurt, no tell. No fight. Go. Go home. Please."

But still, the voice was not a voice at all. The whistle of a frightened breeze through a shattered windpipe.
x

[Irriari]

The zith stared. Waited. She allowed her prey a moment to decipher the meaning and intent of her words before she began considering retaliation. Was the drykas girl so stupid that she would render herself mute while punishment loomed overhead? Irriari doubted that she was. She peered at the girl as her clawed hand tightened around the girls face. The pressure wasn't forceful enough to mar or rip the skin, but it was enough to constantly remind the girl of the price she would pay for silence.

Irriari felt the girls throat convulse and move as she tried to form words. The pleading look that emanated from her light eyes was hauntingly beautiful. Her eyes screamed while her throat was silent, and Irriari allowed herself to drown in the raw emotion she saw inside of them. Few things felt as right as creating fear, and the zith thanked her ancestors for the gift that was her birthright.

The voice that came out of her preys throat was not the voice of a singer. Indeed it was nothing like anything she had heard from the proud Vanator or the other drykas. Her prey sang with a whispered voice that had been broken in the past. Intrigued, the zith lifted her hand as the delicate voice floated upward. The zith stilled and focused, allowing her hearing to stretch forward to catch the faintest of sounds that her songbird sang. The words were in a drykas tongue that was incomprehensible to the zith. The song captivated Irriari, regardless of the meaning that was lost in translation. It was poetic... almost like Sevrai.

Anger flooded into Irriari, soon to be followed by heart wrenching pain. The plea that followed the song was lost on the zith as she pushed herself off the ground and moved away from the drykas girl. Sevrai's crumpled and broken body filled her minds eye, and all else faded into black. The zith keened as she remembered the blood that had smeared floor and gashes that had littered Sevrai's chest. Her precious Sevrai would never smile again. She would never joke about the silly way Irriari would grumble and complain about the length of her stories. Her beloved slave, the one who understood her, was dead. Irriari's knees hit the grasses, and she opened up a gash along her left arm, heedless of the pain and blood. Fierce had murdered Sevrai, and nothing would bring her back. He had destroyed her heart. She screamed then, wishing that she could kill Fierce a thousand times more to dull the pain.

Senseless, Irriari stared at the droplets of blood that welled up and fell down her arms. Her heart was gone.

[Aramenta]

Panic had done its work now, reasons subsumed in a situation in which reason could not understand the possibility of safety anymore. The subconscious crawled in and took its place, the drumbeat of simple orders still racing through Ara's head.

//Obey. Be pliant, be small and listen and serve. Do what she asks, do what she wants.//

And then... the woman shook oddly, subtly, a faint vibration of flesh Ara felt in her thighs under the heaviness that rested on them. And then, the heaviness was gone, and the women knelt to the side, tearing the flesh of her arm open. Ara watched, and would have screamed, if her voice had come. She pulled herself up into a crouch.

Some part of her mind still knew the first instinctual course - to run. The woman was hurt in some way, the beast distracted by some other business. She should run, should hope that Canter would find her, that they could flee. It would be nice to say she simply saw the impossibility of this plan: that the monster did not want her dead, apparently, had some purpose of demonstration clearly in having her be alive and seen by her the other Drykas. That running, alone and without Strider, pack or kit into the Sea of Grass was recipe for as painful a death as the tortures of the woman would be.

But in honesty, it was none of this, it was the numb drumbeat of the subconscious. Serve, obey. be quiet and small. Obey. Obey. Obey and live. Be what is required.

And she lost herself in that, the mind unwilling to face any larger reality than the simple possibilities of fulfilling the wishes of her captor.

It was thus, then, that she found herself taking the axe from her belt to set quietly to the side, and, with quivering hands, crawling forward, head bowed, back curled subserviently. She did not try to speak now - she hardly could, her voice, after trying to be loud so long, was red and raw, as sharp as a long-knife, keened for butchering. Instead. Her shaking hand reached forward, slow, tentative toward her hair, and unthreaded a broad, red linen ribbon, then reached forward, to try to clean the bloody gash on the queer, downy-haired arm of the monster-woman.

Serve, obey, fulfill. Be what is needed. Be what is valuable, desireable, too small, too obedient to be worth eliminating.
x

[Irriari]

Irriari lost herself in the pain. Far away, she knew that something important was happening. Voices in her mind tugged at her and urged her to go back, but she ignored them all. What was the point? Her heart was gone. Blood seeped more slowly down her arm as the wound began to heal, and as it crusted over her furred skin, Irriari slowly came to. She would never get closure, but it wouldn’t do to sit in the Sea of Grass and die. The thought of dying to an angry glass beak was enough to rouse the zith.

She turned slowly, and saw the drykas girl reaching toward her arm with a delicate ribbon, attempting to stem the flow of the last few drops of the blood that dripped from the gash. Irriari let the girl tie off the ribbon and chuckled at how ineffectual it would be if the wound was tore open again. She stood up and noted the posture of the girl. It was too subservient, too weak.

“I could enslave you, you know? I could take you away from here and bring you back to Ravok. You would be my precious songbird. My eternal dove. I could even replace that hideous windmark with a brand of my own.”

Speaking the words brought them to life in her minds eye, and she stared long and hard at the girl who was prone on the grass below her. She was no Sevrai, but she could become a good slave with work. Irriari’s eyes flicked to the girls windmark and she remembered why she had attacked the drykas. If she stole the girl away from the Sea of Grass, Vanator would never know that she had come back to Cyphrus.

Every second that the girl stayed was a test to her willpower. She reached down, stroking the girls soft hair. Her voice was flat and emotionless as she spoke:

“Thank you. Now, leave. Go.”

Irriari turned and began walking away, hoping that the girl would understand and run far away.

[Aramenta]

Ara was no healer, and her work was largely ineffectual, but done with shaking, gentle fingertips, her eyes trained downward, brushing softly against the queer skin, hairy like her father's arms, but knit with the slender curvature she remembered faintly, distantly, from her mother's. The woman chuckled at her, and she cringed again.

This was wrong, she was doing it wrong, she was not what she should be. Serve, Ara! What does she want, she wants something more, something you are not giving, what is it? Ara could not cower any lower...

She listened frustratedly to the woman's words, again - why must she speak so quickly? She felt like the far-off ancestors, trying to listen to each other's calls up the echoing caves, thinking if only, if only she could just... understand every word, she would know what to do, would know what the woman wanted of her. And nothing else made sense. The earth was chill with the coming spring night, the wind was growing keen and dry with the edges of a storm, the sky pricking wild clouds in long hunts above her. The grass now even hissed. Nothing needed her here, she was good here for nothing, only meat, only meat awaiting hunger. Except to this creature, who asked something of her, something she could not understand.

Slave. Slave? She picked that word out of the stream, and rolled it around her mind, translating it into her own tongue. Absently making the sign before her breast. Slave. Slave. Slave. The sign that Livvy made each time she introduced herself. Slave, slave with a waver of loyalty, devotion, pride. Love.

She looked at the woman, saw the monster-eyes flick to the space just underneath Ara's neck, where just the utmost corner of her windmark showed, a peak of flame around a slender distaff, the fibers running down beneath her blouse. She closed her eyes, and she could feel, almost, the line of the mark, reaching down, down, down her spine, to the spindle hanging just beneath her waist. She focused herself into that, the heart of her identity - the wooden maiden, ever spinning, twining, twining, fibers from her lips, her mind, her heart... what was there now to spin? The trouble with being a spindle was, that when the distaff came up empty, you were nothing anymore. And the distaff of the earth was empty now, the distaff of the sky was empty, the distaff of the wind pulled its fibers away.

She would die here. Here, alone, in the plains of her birth, without even her strider to mourn her. A discarded spindle, dropped too far.

And then, in the bottom of her fear, she felt it, the most unexpected of sensations: a hand on her hair. Her mind knew what the hand was - hardly a hand at all, a talon, a claw. And so she closed her eyes, because there, alone and terrified, she needed it to be a hand. She needed it, oh Semele, how she needed it, to be not teasing cruelty, but love. Protection. A duty to be performed. A work to do. She needed this creature to be her distaff, now, when every other had lost sight of her, abandoned her. Her heart whirled slowly, jerkingly. Her head tipped back, ever so subtly into the hand, turning just slightly so that the woman's palm brushed the skin of her cheek.

Livvy, when she made the sign of slave, she did not cringe, there was no horror in it. Love, and pride, and surety, all these things. Dedication. Ara breathed deeply and opened her eyes again.

Do not look too hard. Only listen, obey. Serve. Be what is needed. Be what is desired. Spin, spindle, spin.

And then, the distaff faltered, and she wobbled. For the first time the woman spoke a sentence simple enough that Ara understood it all, every word. The hand left her hair, her cheek; the beast began walking away. Her heart stopped, the scudding clouds fell heavy on her eyes, the wind giggled in her ears, the grass hissed angrily around her. What had she done wrong? No... the dark woman had thanked her. Thanked her! The dark woman, the woman she did not even know as a name yet, would not go, she could not leave her here, unstrung and alone. She had wanted... she had wanted something earlier. Ara stumbled forward after the woman, her breath shallow and frightened. She reached stumbling too sudden, too violent perhaps, her desperation overriding her caution, clasping the woman's should over the curvature of her wing, and hissed desperately in her ear.

"Vanator! You ask want thing, me? He do thing at you? You need me?"

x

[Irriari]

OOCWish this was better, QQ.
Irriari walked forward with hesitant steps. Her legs were filled with something far heavier than lead as she moved away from the drykas girl. ‘Don’t look back’. She forced the words into her mind, filled her body full of the urge to move forward, to press on. Soon enough, the drykas girl would be gone to her people, and the zith could forget about the encounter. After all, it would be easy to forget how the auburn haired girl had touched her and cowered in the grass. Wouldn’t it? Deep down, the zith knew that even the prettiest of lies couldn’t burn away the feeling of the hair that had been clenched in her fist. Nothing could erase the whispered song that reminded her of her heart.

Steeling herself, Irriari prepared herself to throw the girl to the ground. While the drykas girl was not heavy enough to pull her down to the grasses, her presence was enough to break what little willpower the zith clung to. The broken, haunting voice met her ears again, and she turned back in earnest, staring at the girl who was already so desperate to serve.

She imagined Vanator shaking the girl, questioning her about the whereabouts of the zith. What part of the plains had the zith been on? Why didn’t you attack her? How did you get captured?

The scenario got progressively worse the more she imagined. Shaking her head, Irriari spoke more slowly this time, making sure that her words were as clear as possible.

“You not talk to Vanator about me. Hide. Understand?”

Irriari touched the girls hair again, waiting for the answer that would assure Irriari of her safety. If she could not have the drykas as her slave, she could protect the girl from her own people.