They took my wings. The very things that made me an Illyrian, made me whole, and they took them away. Just two little cuts dragged right along the base of the wings, and my fate was decided for me. I was ruined, to make me a more dignified lady. Prepped and ready for marriage, gone was my chance at a future of freedom. At a life of hope and wonder. I never dreamt for much, I just hoped I'd keep something of myself, just something that gave me the illusion of freedom. I was wrong.
I was nothing now. I was less than nothing. A slave to do the chores, a child bearing whore for whoever decided they wanted to mix their blood with mine. I could never fly away, never say no. I had lost those rights with my wings, lost my childhood with them too. I was to do as the males told me, and nothing else. And it broke my heart. More than anything ever could, more than I knew was possible.
Almost immediately after the clipping I was whipped for crying, for being weak and unworthy. They didn't realize it wasn't any pain that drew the salty water to my eyes, but my murdered hope, nursed all these years by tales of girls being allowed to train, wing clipping being made illegal, rights being equal. But I should have known fate is a cruel mistress, and camps on the outer edges of the territory did not bow to the high lord of the night court.
I stumbled home after the beating, covered in blood and bruises, less alive than I'd ever been, despite having been injured worse. I cleaned and wrapped my wounds, as well as bound my wings tightly out my sight. I couldn't use them, I didn't want to see them either. I didn't eat, I knew it was unlikely I would keep anything down. I sank to the floor and wept. Hours past and still I lay there, crying. For me, for all Illyrian women who went through this.
I was unlucky. Those with curvier hips, bigger busts, cleaner smiles got to choose who they wed. Or their families could, and often they picked with the same thoughts in mind. They had lines of suitors fighting each other to own the female, often leaving with the least abusive or strongest of the camp. I was not so lucky. While my hair was fair and my eyes the color of the sky, my skin was pale and marked, my body no more developed than a young girls. These were markings of bad blood, of non Illyrian blood. It offered me only one favor, the year and a half of solitude amount other unwed females, before a winged male with the cruel glint of hatred in his eye stooped to a less attractive female, in the idea of not having to fight for an object he would just abuse. A male with no intent for children, and a wife he could put down if he ever changed his mind.
Property. That's all I'd become, all I would now ever be. My husband was cruel, but not unusually so. He wanted a mindless slave, an item to keep round his house and hit when he got mad, and ignore at all other times. A vase, fragile and delicate, mere decoration. He wouldn't touch me otherwise, I wasn't what he wanted to bear his children. I was just there. So I complied with his orders, his demands, no life left in me. I gave up living, i gave up hoping for a kinder future. I contemplated throwing myself off the edge of the camp more times than I could count, ready to take myself to the next world, to freedom The only relief I had was that he was gone often, drinking and mounting females more attractive than me, better wives and women who were designed for this life. Who hadn't dreamed of a safer one. A better one.
It was another two years of this torture, this mind numbing pain before I broke fully. My mind, shattered into tiny fragments pieced a few back together by force, in the wrong order. I took pleasure in the pain gifted to me, began slicing at my wrists to relieve myself when my husband wasn't in a violent mood. Nobody noticed, I never left the house and my husband was far from attentive to me. He didn't see what he did to me and what I did to myself. I stopped eating, starving myself into an unnatural thinness, in an attempt to feel more beautiful, to have some pride. It didn't work. Every slice I made, every meal I passed, left me weaker and more hurt than before. My husband still commented cruelly on my looks, still went out and had his way with other females. It was like a weight attached to my mind, constantly pulling and pulling and pulling it down. But it felt good, because it had a feeling. I was so numb to myself and the things around me, I needed the pain, the hunger, to ground me. To make me feel.
Then war came. It came and it left, without me stepping foot outside. Men came home, bloody and injured, but mine never did. I couldn't decide if I was grateful for this, it left me alone and forgotten in his house, barely more than a child myself. But I made do. The first time I stepped outside in more than two years came, and I felt... I felt. Something. It wasn't happiness, not yet, but it was something close. I stood there, two steps outside of my house for over an hour. Just listening, just feeling.
I had to force myself to move eventually, more life in me now than ever before. I scurried to the market to be met with the bustling square and gathered what I would need. It was time to dream again.