WARNING
This story may contain torture, gore, and other unsavory topics.
It is not recommended for those faint of heart or stomach.
This story was not created out of the authors interests, but as a reminder that the atrocities committed in this story are far from fictional. Many such actions are taken against fellow humans every day. I think it's awful, and I heavily condemn it.
Nimba, like many young nymphs, didn't do many chores, nor did she think it right for her to. At least, she didn't use to. That had changed months ago, with the capture of her and her sister Sierra by the telkhine slavers. Now, she wasn't so sure.
The telkhines had, as much as she hated to admit it, taught her something. She was a free spirit, giddy, carefree. Sometimes, they would use Sierra and another nymph, Rose, to...convince her. But while Nimba was as she had described herself before, Rose was more so to an almost indescribable degree. So most of the time, they used Nimba and Sierra to convince Rose.
As with many other younglings, Nimba also did not like to like to go to bed. She did not want to sleep. At least, she used to. That too had changed months ago, with the forced realization of the glory of sleep. The first few days of her capture had gone as normal. She was fed meal at a rate that could only be described as pitiful. She was treated harshly, berated daily, but nothing she didn't expect of her captors. Every night, she went to bed on the rickety cot with it's meager blankets, and hay filled pillows.
It was upon one of these very nights that she first experienced the real cost of loss of sleep. Her blissful slumber, broken only by the occasional fit of Sierra in the bed adjacent to hers. She didn't even notice the lurching of her humble bed, the creak of the rusted cell door, the rasping of leather clad feet on the campered dungeon stones. She did notice it when she was unceremoniously dumped upon the floor of an unrecognizable room. Her eyes shot open nearly as fast as the clammy water upon the sunken floor permeated the fibers of her cotton garb. Blinding fluorescent lights blazed to life on the ceiling above, causing her to wince and squint her eyes. She waited for ages for the cell door to open, for people who threw her in to come back, to give her bed back, a blanket, anything.
Nothing happened. She lay curled in the highest, dryest corner of the room, and slowly drifted to sleep. It wasn't clouds that visited her in her sleep tonight. Tonight she was someone else. She looked upon her hands, sniffed at her reddish locks, and it came to her. She was Rose. And then she realized where she was. She was in an infirmary, and all around her nymphs and satyrs and nature spirits lay in clean white cots, all with battlefield injuries. With instincts she didn't know she had, she lept into action, bandaging cuts and stitching gashes, strapping on splints and cinching down tourniquets. She smiled as she reached the end of the row, Rose's skill was useful. She turned to observe her work.
She screamed. The pristine white sheets were littered with blood. And the patients...oh the patients. The splints were speared into the tender stomachs, the bandages wrapped tightly around their mouth and nose, the torniquet's rubber forming a noose around their throats, the neat stitches sealing their mouths and nostrils and eyes.
Nimba bolted awake, her chest heaving. A telkhine squatted in the middle of the room, hovering over a bucket and rag and a bowl of meal. "You've been rather obedient lately. If it weren't for that rebellious sister of yours I'd take that in stride. But doing that would be a fatal mistake for me, as nymphs in your situation are deceptive. You act all good and obedient around me, but that sister of yours plants a seed of rebellion in you. A seed that might germinate one day while you are serving your master. I have to make it…"
As he spoke, he drew a swipe of meal from the bowl, flinging the gummy substance against the wall, "...Stick. Originally, I was going to use this as a standard torture room. But one day while I was hunting a demigod with my friends I noticed something. The demigod never slept. Not for two weeks, until I finally had enough of stalking him and simply attacked him while he was awake. He killed some of my friends, but I got to ask him something that had been bugging me. 'Why don't you sleep, tasty demigod?' He gazed at me with an indifferent expression and said, 'If I sleep, the nightmares will come. I can't take that.'"
The telkhine chuckled, slashing through the air as if reliving cutting the boy's throat. "At the time, I thought he meant us. But now I realize the truth, and it is the very truth that you will have to face while in the room's walls cursed by Hecate herself. You have control. Sleep, or don't. But while you're awake, clean up in here. Knock on the door if you need more supplies."
And with that final note, he stood, and left. The lights on the ceiling glowed bright upon the warm room, and yet Nimba was left hugging her shivering form. She couldn't fall asleep. She couldn't go through that again. She couldn't, she wouldn't, she would clean the place to the last speck or smudge but she wouldn't fall asleep again. She quickly downed her slimy sustenance and got to work.
It took over 15 buckets of fresh water to finish scrubbing the walls and floor, and scrubbing to the point where her hands grew blistered and sore from the the soft rag, her knees were bruised and stained from resting on them for so long. And try as she might, she collapsed upon the floor.
The sound of armoured boots clicking on the tile floor awoke her. The telkhine from earlier was grinning down at her, a wicked gleam in his eye. "You know, I thought you were made of tougher stuff than that. Truth is, it ain't the room that's does this nightmare stuff to you. It's a potion that we put in your food. It's expensive, so I didn't put it in today because I thought your pathetic little cloud nymph willpower would be enough to power you through this task. Apparently not."
He motioned to someone outside the cell, and the sound of a rolling cart and clinking metal instruments echoed down the hall, through the cell door and into her ears. "You see, now that you know the truth about this, we'll have to resort to other methods to make an impression on you. It's a shame that spent so long cleaning this room, only for you to be the one to get it dirty again...hold her down."
Two dracaena surged into the room, grabbing her arms and pinning them to the warm tiled floor. The cart she had heard earlier rattled into the room, and from it he grabbed a leather bag. From it, he withdrew a small vial of some sort of cream, a pair of extra large gloves, a tongue depressor, and a scalpel.
"Unfortunately, I can't be leaving any major scars on you. That means I can't be doing anything too physically damaging. So I decided to do something else." With that, he pulled on the gloves, and before she could react, cut a deep gash in the tender skin of her upper arm. She cried out in pain, trying to free herself, but she only managed to incentivise the dracaena guards to tighten their grip. "Easy now, easy…"
He made a similar cut on the other arm, eliciting the same reaction from her. And then he put the bloodied scalpel back in the bag. "There, all done with the scary knife. The next part, however, should show you how expensive you are to us. We have already had to use a rather costly potion on you, and yet here we are with another." He opened the vial of gel, it's translucent orange projecting a warm amber light upon her face.
"This is a pretty special mix. It starts with honey, pure and untainted. Then we add the distillates of three of Medea's finest healing draughts, along with a pinch of unicorn horn shavings. But the final ingredient is what makes it really special. A healthy dose of poneratoxin, stolen from a bio lab in Texas. That's the same toxin in the stinger of the Bullet Ant, the most painful sting in the world."
With that, he scooped up a half-teaspoon sized glob of the mixture upon the tongue depressor, and smeared inside her cut, quickly repeating with the other arm. At first, nothing happened. The excruciating pain coursed through her body, flooding her bloodstream. The dracanae let go of her arms and she was left alone in the cell. She tried desperately to squeeze the burning cream out of her arm, but to no avail. The healing aspect of the cream had already sealed the cut with the gel inside, turning her formerly open wound into a lightly pink patch of skin. She writhed on the floor in agony for what felt like hours, but was probably only minutes, until finally her mind succumbed to the pain and she blacked out.
When she awoke again, the pain in her arm was completely gone. The telkhine entered the room, placing her bowl of meal on the floor along with a fresh rag and bucket. Nimba spoke out this time. "You got rid of the gel you put in my arms. Why?"
The telkhine looked at her with a smile that seemed to be of either polite confusion or devilish satisfaction. "Why, I don't know what in Hades you're talking about. Must have been a dream, little nymph."
After he left, she looked at the bowl of meal. What if it wasn't a dream? Reluctantly, she shoved the untouched food out the slot in the door. It wasn't worth it, and she had cleaning to do.
Cleaning and chores overtook her life from that day on. She worked hard, harder than she had ever worked before. It helped take her mind off the frequent nightmares that invaded her nights. She got assigned to an island with her sister and Rose and two other, more senior nymphs. The one named Palírroia took the lead. Sierra, on the other hand, seemed distant. She had spent the briefing period scowling at the trainer's feet, seemingly ignoring all around her. As Nimba needed to help Palírroia, she asked Rose to watch over Sierra, as she didn't want her doing anything stupid.
She could never have expected Sierra would try something so drastic so soon. It was Palírroia that finally put an end to her panicked search for Rose or Sierra. It was one look from her face that told Nimba all she needed to know. She stumbled forward, unconsciously clinging to Palírroia like her life depended on it. She cried, and screamed, and cried some more, until her tear ducts refused to give any more tears, at which point she quietly sobbed.
Her sister was gone. Her best friend. Her constant companion. Her kin that had stuck with her through the past few torturous months. And the last she had seen of her wasn't her loving smile, her cheerful grin, not even her fierce scowl of determined rebelliousness. The last she had seen of her sister was her broken, almost empty gaze as she tuned out the world around her.
She needed to do something. Something good, and as much of it as she could, for something unspeakably bad had just occurred. She tore herself from Palírroia's embrace, sprinting as fast as her lithe legs could carry her, into the house and straight for the supply closet. She grabbed the first cleaning supply she found, a bottle of glass cleaner, along with a rag, and sprinted to the nearest window. She burst into a room, instantly noticing one of the panes on the broad array of windows had a large smudge on it, a rose petal lying on the ground below it. She tossed the petal into the garbage, and began to clean the windows with vigor. She needed to make everything perfect. She would not allow any more unhappiness to befall any and all residents of galínios. She would make things better.
Things didn't get better until Perseus, her master, arrived. She had been expecting a cruel, vituperative lord with none of their well being any of his concern. He was the polar opposite. His gentle words and few soft kisses to her forehead filled her with glee.
She spent every waking moment pursuing perfection in servitude. It was only on rare occasions that she would allow something to distract her from her chores. Palírroia failing to show for her morning rounds was one such occasion. It was the morning after the head nymph had spent the day with master at the hot springs, and Nimba found her lying upon her bed exhausted. "Palírroia, is there anything I can do to help?" She asked, her voice a mix of concern and hopefulness.
"Ah… Nimba… I need you to give Khione her breakfast for her today." She muttered tiredly, seemingly in a stupor. "Would you do that for me?"
Nimba nodded excitedly, and rushed from the room, headed for the kitchen. Such a duty was something reserved for the head nymph and the head nymph alone. It was a massive responsibility. She would make her master proud today. Recently acquired breakfast in hand, she raced into the dungeon where Khione was kept, flinging open the door to her cage, lost in her enthusiasm.
A flash of blue scorched her eyes and a deadly chill ripped through her body, and for the first time in many months, no nightmares plagued her slumber.
