Prologue
First fanfic ever. It would be really really awesome if you reviewed…. Constructive criticism, compliments, advice is very welcome! I'd like comments so I know if I should keep writing or not…
"Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak."
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Day ninety-three of captivity ended just like every other.
At least, she thought it was day ninety-three. It was a rough estimate, as good of an estimate as she could make. How could one keep track of time, locked in a bare, dark room for at least a quarter of a year? The only sense of time she had was from the long, narrow windows fifteen feet above her head. Black cast-iron bars ran vertically along each window, preventing any captives from escape—as if anyone could escape when the windows were little more than slits, and too high on the wall to be reached. Through the slits, she could vaguely tell the time of day. She could see when the sky was blue; she would look at it until her eyes burned, eager to see some sort of color. Even her visitors seemed to be colored in shades of black and white and grey.
What had happened? A few years ago she had been just a child. She swam naked in the river with her cousins. Her mother would scold her for riding her horse past dark. She and her brother fed ham to the dogs under the table, and her father would laugh. She would skip her lessons to flirt with guards who were too old for her; she hadn't even bled yet. Her father wasn't too happy about that.
It was perhaps three hours after dark—and only a few minutes after her visitor left—when she fell asleep. Then came the dreams. They were getting more and more solid; the felt nearly real, as if to compensate for the bizarre, nightmarish events that took place during her days.
She was climbing a pile of dead bodies. She had never seen a dead body until just ninety-three days ago, but she remembered what they looked like, what they smelled like, all too well. They smelled like blood, and raw meat straight from the butcher, and when they had been left to rot, they smelled just like dead animals, like when she would wander around her father's keep and find a dead cat or rat in the corner of an old, unused room. When she looked closer, they were men—and women—that seemed to be from every realm. Why was she stepping on the bodies of her countrymen? Some of these were not her enemies. But they were, she didn't know why, and she was angry.
Some of them looked all too familiar. Was that her brother's chest she was stepping on? She stepped on the face of a strange grey-haired man whom she vaguely recognized, but whose name she could not place. His mouth opened, only to be filled with squirming white maggots. His eyes oozed a river of pus and blood.
She stepped on a blonde woman's hair, causing the woman to jerk awake, blood sputtering from her mouth. She had a deep stab wound in her chest through her blue silk gown. The woman looked at her desperately, taking shallow jagged breaths.
"You're a woman," the woman said, surprisingly clearly considering her near-death state.
"I'm a woman," she repeated back to the woman, confused.
"You're a beautiful woman."
"Am I?"
"You know you are," replied the blonde woman. "Use it. Get out." The woman's face crumpled into a look of deep sadness, maybe even regret. "I'm not supposed to be telling you this."
She awoke to the sound of the heavy metal door being opened. She was so accustomed to it by now that she didn't even jump. The pale, ugly guard came with a towel and a bucket of water.
"Wash your cunt," he screeched. She was convinced those were the only words in her language that he knew. Sometimes he threw in various adjectives, like "dirty" or "whore". The first time he told her to "wash her cunt", she couldn't understand his thick accent and had been hit when she had asked him to repeat himself. Her main visitor was angry that she had been hit; he wanted to keep her pretty. No small wonder; all of the women from his realm seemed hideous to her.
He threw the towel at her, and she dipped it in the bucket full of soap and steaming hot water. She undressed and slowly washed herself, not caring about the guard's voracious stares. After all, she was only a woman. And that's how men looked at women. She smiled to herself.
She was getting out. Maybe not today, or the next day, but she was getting out.