“I want to go home now”

Your words sound quiet and childlike.

“I’m sorry?” The captain leans forward with mock joviality, raising a hand and cupping her ear. You try to repeat yourself, mouth flapping with lethargic movements. Your throat is raw from screams, and the sting of pain still lingers inside it from your last words. The next come out in a hoarse whisper, barely loud enough for you to hear it.

“P-Please...let me go.”

You’ve heard mice that sound braver; stillness that sounds bolder; ghosts that sound more living. She responds with exaggerated understanding.

“Ah, I see.” She leans back, the creak of her chair ringing in the room. Not even your shaking makes a noise, only what’s shaken loose, pattering to the floor.

She sits in silence, watching you as a part of your mind kicks the rest. No, kicking is too light of a term; this is stomping. You scream at yourself in your mind. ‘You useless bitch! You whore! What did you think would happen!?’ The words flow as steadily as the beat on the floorboards, hammering away at you and twisting the memory in deeper. A chattering council of thoughts tear through your mind, half belittling your ****, half huddled up at the memory, and the thin minority in the middle simply bent over a table bleeding. The seconds drag on, then a minute, all spent by the captain, unseen, looking at you form, broken without and within, until finally, a creaking sounds.

“NARNEN!” The captains sudden bark makes you jump. Worse, it make you clench in fright and you almost scream again at the pain.

Heavy footfalls come, rushing from one side of the room to the other, like an invisible man, or a ghost heedless of beds, chests, and tables. It’s only when a “Yes Captain!?” comes downs through the far window that you realise the sound came from the roof above, its patrol running to the captains call.

“Double the guard and get down here, I have a job for you.”

She’s immediately answered with another ‘Yes Captain!’ and the footsteps faded away.

Again, time lingers; time where the captain watches and you writhe internally. Your body stays still, weak and ineffectual as it is. Powerless. It’s as though, regardless of rational thought, it fears the return of its abuser; its new and perhaps eternal owner, or perhaps another fresh nightmare. One of the voices in your head states that perhaps such a thing should happen. Is there any other use for your body? Perhaps your whore of a self is only fit to be sodomised. To not even be treated as a woman. The voice takes on a sneering tone. ‘If you didn’t want it, you would have fought harder’ it seemed to say. The wails of the other voices redouble.

In short order, the man enters after a courteous nock. He pauses, his first sight after the captain no doubt one of your bloodied behind.

“Er, hum, er, t-the guard has already been doubled Captain. We all heard the noises and a runner was sent by Rock straight away.”

They all heard the noises. All of them. Your noises.

“Very good. Take our guests to the back of the island and throw her in the sea, if you’d be so kind.”

Not all of them. Not some noises. They didn’t hear the tear, or the thick pounding drum upon your flesh. They didn’t hear the bubbles crisp and pop as blood was rawed to froth

“Oh, and be a dear and don’t fuck her.”

Is that relief you feel at her words? Surely it is. It should be. Are you still capable of feeling something good? She stands and slides her fingers down your spine as she walks away, gliding it through a sheen of cooling sweat.

“I think she’s had enough for one day, don’t you?” The state of your rears gaping, bleeding hole allows only one response.

“Ay Captain.”

He approaches where you lie before pausing, perhaps considering his next move or simply admiring the view. You don’t move to stand, or at all really, and after a moment, he puts his hands under your arms and hauls you up by your pits. It’s a foolish move on your part, one born of natural instinct, but your legs attempt for a moment to stand. The agony that shoots through your broken exit turned entrance sends a spasm through you that drops you from his grasp and onto your knees. Fearing this being taken for **** to go, you weakly help him as he grabs your wrists and hauls your form over his shoulders until your side rests at the back of his neck. You say nothing, going limp as a sack of grain as he holds your arm and the back of your bloody legs before walking out the door.

The room with the big table and its chests passes under your vision, literally. The table is low and its size limits traversal, so your guide forgoes working around it. A small bounce is all the warning you get before he steps up and walks across it without pause, careful only to avoid his captain’s maps and charts that litter its surface. You don’t look at anything as you pass to the balcony and the foyer, but soon his shoulders beat you with each step taken down the stairs. The people in the foyer proper stop talking as you are carried past, rump facing them and face turned away. They take in the visuals of the screams they heard without comment, casual in their observations. You leave out the front, the old wooden floor turning to loose gravel as a thin breeze teases your bear flesh. The guard outside is not alone and many voices and catcalls chase after you. You can’t help but turn one eye to look at them. Some laugh, some smile, some wince with exaggerated sympathy or gesture with hands or bodies to their riotous friends. Only one of the men looking on has a blank face, turned pale perhaps with his own memories. It may be your imagination, but he turns away bitterly when he sees you looking and you can’t help but think he’s bled as you have.

The path turns to grass which turns to woods and dirt and dark. Bushes and branches slow you; snagging and whipping you both as he moves carefully in the dark, labouring under your carry. Cracking branches and the sound of nature pausing warily as you pass is all that joins your journey; the heavy breathing and wet sniffles from your respective noses are all that you give in return. What little breeze there is rustles the leaves up above, and soon that’s joined by a new wheeze in the man’s breath, growing louder the further he goes with you as his burden. He says nothing, of course, and you respond in kind; him to save his breath for his walk and so he doesn’t have to treat you like a person; you only for the latter reason, keen to remain a thoughtless wait on someone else’s shoulder.

Eventually, the trees give way and the moonlight returns to shine on an uneven grassy field. He drops you gently; not out of concern, but simply as part of his breathless collapse to the soft mounds of wild grass. You land on your back, wincing as your body straightens, the dimmed throbbing pain flaring once more, left to look up at the stars, at the gods, twinkling their stellar light. Your mind is not on them though, but with the sound of the sea and the lapping waves a short distance away. You’re to be thrown out to sea; used and discarded. There should be no beaches at the rear of the island, at least according to the maps you studded so long ago, before you came here, and the words of your guide. Will he throw you off a cliff? The thought of sharp rocks at the bottom is not so nightmarish as it should be. Your cheeks are still wet, yet no tears blur your vision. If feels like they should after what you’ve lost.

What was that? What have you lost? You definitely feel the hollow he made, but lost? He took your dignity, your honour, your peace of mind and privacy, but these are things he took. You know where they went and how. Your body he returned to you, fouled, broken and bloody. Used. Dirty. So what have you lost? What are you feeling? The answer come to you. ‘Ahh, that’s it...’ you think, ‘my worth.’ The thing that you decide about yourself. Somehow it was shaken loose. Or a curtain was thrown wide and a new light shone upon it. It wasn’t taken from you; you were just shown that you were wrong. You thought you were worth something -built yourself around that idea- and now it’s gone and your worth is revealed. Nothing. You’re worth nothing at all.

The breathing beside you slows as its owner pays his body’s debt. You don’t look at him, but the sound of him shifting joins the gentle noise of the sea. He kneels at your side, breathing deep and unmoving in the corner of your vision, and immediately, you feel his eyes wondering; prickling your skin with their trespass. Those eyes feel like those of a starving man, eyeing the meat on some butchers table, but that would make his Captain the butcher, her words still ringing as they echo between you and him, halting his action. Then again, his captain is not here, and who would know?

His begins moving again, shifting and gripping with his unseen hand upon himself, not looking away, coaxing himself to action. Before long -perhaps inevitably- his trousers come away. You could run, couldn’t you? You’re not so sure your body can walk on its own right now. Even if it could, why bother? So another man wants in; big surprise. Maybe he’ll treat you like a woman instead of a bitch. It’s a toxic thought; one you hate as soon as you recognise. You feel thoughts like that ooze out like blood dripping from the wound in your mind. Perhaps in time, that wound will close. Perhaps not.

He grows larger in your sights, shifting into your vision. The night is warm, but not so much that nakedness can be forgotten. You expect his touch, his heat; for him to become a rough blanket both without and within, but it doesn’t come. He just kneels and pulls at his sole grip, grunting with the effort. His breathing, one calmed, climbs again as though he carries you once more. He reaches out and as you feel his hand on your thigh, pulling it out, you think ‘here he comes’, but still, nothing. He only grunts and shakes as he looks at what’s between your legs. Perhaps the captains orders keep him back, like some kind of talisman. Perhaps this is some cruel trick before the main event. His hand slips away and finally, he climbs on top.

You look up at him, finally, confused at his action. It...isn’t right. Or perhaps you should say, it isn’t the kind of wrong you were expecting. He straddles you, knees at the side of your stomach, hand at his member, pulling back and forth at quite a speed. His clothes are strange, at least those he has; his arms are in tight sleeves yet his chest is bare as though the tailor forgot the rest of this jacket. His eyes, hidden in darkness by the moon behind him, feel fixed on your breasts as he looks down at you, and his whole top half, from what you can see of it, is hunched and silhouetted against the twinkling gods that back him. For a moment you think of the situation they look upon, that they condone with their inaction. They watch you, over his shoulder, as the man atop you pleasures himself, grunting and panting with his movement. They are watching; you can see them. They have no excuse this time. The sight of them fills you with disgust and you turn your head away.

Time passes, until the lusts he stoked within himself take control. You flinch as he takes your breast into his free hand, pulling and squeezing it in a way far different than himself. If feels like the way Roland did it; hard and uncaring, and for a moment you almost feel him inside you again, crushing you against that table. As if in salute of that bitter memory, you feel hot sprays lance across your chest, reaching your neck and jaw as his grunts turn to strangled cries. You know without looking that it is his seed. The last of such fiery emanations you felt still burns within your colon. His essence hits you again and again, neck, chest, and eventually stomach, the **** behind the barrage fading to a pooling pour that connects you to him with a thick strand of white. Abandoning himself, he brings both hands to your chest, smearing the breast that was uncovered during the flood. He plays with both until you feel hardness turn soft and sink to the pool he left on you. Before he stands, he quickly wipes his cock on your belly, freeing it of his dribbling essence, before finally wiping his hands on your arms and shoulders, cementing your worth as a cleaning rag in his eyes.

When his breath is caught and his trousers returned, the dragging begins. Carrying you would dirty him, you reason, so his pulls at your wrists and drags your rump over painfully uneven ground. The sound of the sea grows louder, though never more than that of lapping rocks or gentle froth. The laboured breathing of your guide is heavier. He takes you to the edge of a cliff, if it can be called that, and a heaving push followed by a short drop -about as tall as two men standing- sends you down to the waves.

It’s deep here, and rockless, but about as unwelcoming as it could possibly be. The cold water is a shock after the warm air, and the feel of salt on your wounds adds a blinding dizziness of its own. You think of your guide and your escape and what direction to go in and what blinding pain! Everything fuzzes.

The archipelago is vast and its currents unknowable. Those that eat away at the cliff, the one that marked the end of your visit to Wendigo’s island, carry you out into open water with startling speed. The cloth at your hands becomes heavy and searing as you paddle weakly. You kick your legs towards where you think your guide waits. You can almost see him, in your mind’s eye, waiting to take you home!

Salt water rushes into your broken rear, the pain enough to let the growing blackness take hold. Finally, the wretched night ends with blessed ****.

The sea takes hold. It accepts all gifts with grace. All lost things with magnanimity. All curses with patience. Sailors often view the sea as a savage beast, but it holds no fury, only movement. No moods, but indifference. It bears the weather and its many changes like a mother a child’s tantrum, and even its greatest wave is nothing but a surface ripple compared to its fathomless and unaffected depths. Tonight, it was still; reflecting the mood of the empty sky and adorning itself in all the shining jewels of its radiance. But even in this calm weather, the sea will do what it has always done. The waters below do not change their race of currents, for the depths noticed the calm little more than the storm. As the days turned, as the years turned, nothing changed for the sea; its denizens still caught in natures back and forth. Change was for the world above. Sometimes it was good and sometimes it was bad. The surface of the sea would reflect both with a timeless attitude.

Kilan-rou was looking at the answer to his prayers. A gift from God, or the Gods if his father was to be believed. Apparently, people from the north -who’s skin was milk like in colour- all believed such things, but here it only marked his father, and by extinction Kilan-rou, as outsiders in the village. Fortunately, Kilan-rou’s was born here, and his skin was more normal -like his mother’s- but today, he would pray to his father’s Gods in thanks.

Before him lay a woman whose skin was whiter than his father’s. Truly milk like, as though untouched by the sun. Dark brown hair matted her face, covering her looks, but her beauty shone from behind them in the form of delicately shaped features and pink, slightly parted lips. Greatly adding to her beauty, for Kilan-rou, was the fact that she was also naked.

“What do we do Kil?” His little brother tapped his little fingers together nervously. 10 summers separated them, and he was not yet old enough to wonder the beaches without Kilan-rou to keep an eye on him. They had found the woman washed up on the sands as they walked, or ‘adventured’ as his brother deemed it. At first he thought the woman a corpse; her pale skin the touch of lifeless pallor. When he had turned her to her back, she’d felt warmer than **** should allow, even considering the beating sun and lapping waves. Her eyes had flickered behind her hair, but didn’t open, and her chest gave rise and fall in shallow motions. She looked weak. Weak and **** and very beautiful. More than enough to stir him as a naked woman should. But this was not why his prayers were answered. If only his brother were not here.

When Kilan-rou was born, a sickness had spread. The old were lost, but worse still, many babies and children were taken as well. Kilan-rou was an exception; a miracle to his parents, who thanked the gods and god for their fortune. To Kilan-rou, this was normal; he lived because he lived and owed those above nothing more than the next man, so naturally, he could only see the misfortune of his situation. As he grew, there were almost no children to play with on the whole island, and now that he was almost of marriage age, that lack was felt even more sharply. People had talked of him having to leave to find a wife. Some were even cruel enough to suggest the widow, Brka-na, whose ability to bare children was suspect at best. Kilan-rou had almost accepted.

Now a beautiful woman had come to the island, alone. She was a little older than him perhaps, by a few summers, but far from too old. A little short, but not too short. Her breasts were not large like Bayan-oisha, but whose were? She’d make a fine wife for him, everyone would see that. But would she?

“Help me drag her to the trees.” His brother took one of her hands as he took the other, but it was useless; his brother wasn’t strong enough and she was soon being dragged by only one arm. “Er, ok. You run back to the village. Tell father to come and help. I’ll look after her.” He flicked the fingers of his free hand to his brother, who soon passed the woman’s writs into his care. He looked wide eyed at the responsibility thrust upon him.

“Yes!!!” He ran off without looking back. As long as it was following their own footsteps, he would be fine. Kilan-rou continued dragging her to the trees and soft grass, thinking all the way.

They had been walking for some time; half the morning in fact. It would take at least as long again for his brother to run back and return with their father. As he thought all this, it took only seconds to lay the woman down in the shade.

He kneeled next to her, brushing the hair from her face. She didn’t respond, but he did, with a deep intake of breath. She was beautiful. Her big eyes were closed and framed with strong brows and cheek bones. One of her eyes was deeply darkened with a yellowing bruise and the other was ringed with a shadow born of tiredness, but they were the only blemishes. Her nose was thinner than Kilan-rou’s and even his father’s, but still perfectly matched for the rest of her foreign face. Of that, her chin seemed small, but as he held it between thumb and forefinger, it felt just right.

He looked down at exotic sights he had never seen before. Her nipples were not browner than her skin, but pinker, and they sat on soft flesh that had jiggled when he set her down, but now faded to flatness. She was thin; enough to see her ribs as she lay. Was she out at sea for so long? Kilan-rou could not answer, but suspected not. There were rags tied around her hands that were stained red and more bruises at her stomach. Combined with her face, they spoke of injuries sustained by more than just sea rocks and carelessness. They wrinkled his brow; who could harm such a flower? They were the only pause before his eyes rested on the tuft at her crotch, sitting above thin legs and bare feet.

He was very hard. Harder and fuller than he had ever been before. The woman’s head lolled weakly, her eyelashes twitching behind miring dreams, and a moment of weakness sent his fingertips gliding over her, setting his mind crackling with thoughts and plans. ‘That would be one way to make sure she stayed’ he thought to himself. ‘One way to tie her to him and his home’. The thought of a lonely life without her, wondering the dangerous world or being half mothered by Brka-na, slowly turned his resolve.

After stepping out to verify the small shape of his running brother fading in to the distance, he looked at the sun and the sea. The day may even have turned to evening before he returned here with the others. Lots of time. He returned to the sleeping woman; his beautiful future wife on her marriage bed of grass.

He’d ensure his place as her future husband.

He’d do so as many times as he could.