Manuel

Long spindrels of darknened expectation crawlled across the back of the young man as his deepened thoughts gave in to the spiral of opiate emptiness which consumed his thoughts and left him in a haze. Manuel remembered little of his childhood or adolescence. He had barely remembered the faces of his mother and father, let alone their names. The world before the great Collapse was as foreign to the boy as the merciless world which lay beyond his window.

Manuel's head swelled in the stew of repressed memories from the tenderest of his living existence. Two decades of having been protected and sheltered by his older sister, having believed in her altruistic lies, and seeing nothing but an angel in the snow in her; a motherly cherub, flowering in the spring and wiltering in the autumn.

Manuel had spent years blocking and respressing all that was done unto him by the woman he trusted his life with, the only family he had ever known. Manuel had purposely forgotten so much that his life had become nothing more than a blur, tumbling in the tumult of his faceless existence. Manuel had hoped to have never come face-to-face with the cruelties he had endured at the hands of sister dearest, the ****, the sexual exploitation, the **** and ****, all under the threat of abandonment.

Manuel looked down at Catherine, chained and collared to serve his needs; his former captor and tormentor, now brought down to graze with the insects of the soil. Manuel desired no pleasure from his sister, he had haboured no feelings of deviancy for the one who had defiled him so. But he still wanted to see her suffer.

Manuel posited the cruel and sadistic forms of retribution he could unleash on his old tormentor; his high rank in military command certainly afforded him the freedom to be creative in his methods. He would relish every second of it.