Chapter 1 – Despair Behind and Death Before
Usagi sensed the darkness beyond her eyelids, heavy and ominous, and she thought, it didn't happen. It was a dream, a horrible ghastly dream. A nightmare. It did not happen. It. Was. Just. A. Dream.
"Wake-up." A voice demanded.
"Luna—"
A strong, vicious force clipped her ribs forcing breath to flood out. Usagi gasped, sat-up and cradled her ribs.
"What?" She stared blankly at the chain wrapped around her wrists. She raised her eyes and surveyed the room with a growing sense of horror. It was like looking through grimy blue stained glasses with only the tiny slivers of an orange glow from a squat, hulking iron furnace that roared and snapped like a demon but barely filled the room with heat, as relief. A series of blue naked bulbs ran overhead beside pipes that were alternately gleaming and rusting. The room itself was an amalgam of mud, wood and industrial steel and looked more like a cave carved into a vague shape of a room.
The air was damp and heavy with the smell of oil and something else she couldn't identify.
"You're finally awake." Usagi swung her head to the source of the sound and recoiled. A swarthy, short man wearing bulky winter clothes stood over her, he carried a long ebony rod in his right hand. He swung it ominously near her face. "Takes awhile to wake you, huh, pretty face?"
His voice was oily and the leer on his face sent shivers down her spine.
"What's your name?" He had a very thick accent that made it hard for Usagi to understand his words.
Her mouth was parched but she forced words to come out. "Usa—"
The rod swung hitting her squarely on the jaw. Pain exploded behind her eyes and Usagi screamed.
"Wrong."
Usagi tried to speak but the response was quicker than the last and the pain mounted. She wanted
to cry but it was too painful to do anything but let her tears fall, she pulled at the chains in a futile effort to escape but that earned her another strike. Why was he doing this to her?
"Again."
"N-nothing. I have no name." She flinched, squeezing her eyes tight expecting another painful blow from the rod.
"Good."
Her eyes flew open, she saw the man step forward and in the blue colored light she saw his waxen complexion and his small buttonhole eyes. Bile rose quickly as he leered at her, he reached out and clutched at her hair she whimpered at the sudden tension in her crown, adding to the throbbing pain in her jaw. "You are now the property of Her Majesty the Queen, you no longer exist outside of these mines. You are now C175, do you understand?"
"Y-yes."
"I don't think so." His eyes flickered to one side it was then Usagi realized that they were not alone. A man came forward carrying something short and dark that glowed orange at the end. It looked like a modernized branding iron.
Just before Usagi could react the short swarthy man held her down, the press of his body over hers sent an instinctual animal fear through her body and she reacted violently. He grunted at her kicks and elbow jabs and slapped her when she tried to bite him but nothing she did dislodged him.
"What are you waiting for?" The swarthy man hissed over his shoulder and from that Usagi was able to view the man with the branding iron advanced on them.
The brander came forward orange light flickered on his face and what she saw, what she saw made her blood run cold. It wasn't because he looked eager or evil; it was the fact that he looked bored. He's done it before and felt nothing, no sympathy, no outrage, she was only one of many people he had seen and branded. She was a job. Nothing more.
Usagi kicked out once more, desperate as he knelt and took hold of her right arm and twisted it until the underside of her wrists was exposed. The gleam of the branding iron registered a number C175.
"No!" Usagi screamed, "No! Please!" The brander took no notice of her screamed pleas, of her desperate struggles beneath the swarthy man and her ear splitting scream that made her throat sore. It was a violation she had never experienced before in her two lifetimes.
She never had to know how it was to fight and beg at the same time, never known real terror before, not with all her battles with daimons and monsters. Nothing compared to the reality of meaty, callused hands holding her down bodily as a branding iron came so close to her skin it scorched and the knowledge that whatever she does can not change the outcome.
She wanted it to be over, to be not real, wanted to wake-up and let it all be one long nightmare.
"Stop moving!" The swarthy man growled his beady eyes shone with anger and annoyance.
Blind to everything but escape she called to a source powerful enough to stop this brutality she dug into depths of her soul and found… nothing. No holy white fire, no freedom, nothing whatsoever but the inevitable.
The Silver Crystal was gone.
Her eternal source of power, vanished and in its place an empty gaping hole. She stopped breathing shock overcoming her system. She groped at the ground feeling the soft mud between her fingers, the loss alone should, would have killed her but a savage blow to her jaw jarred her from her suicidal trance. A copper tasting liquid filled Usagi's mouth, her head buzzed from the blow and a mist of darkness descended on her vision, enough, it would seem, to afford the man with the branding iron to do his job.
The brand hissed, finally meeting heat with soft skin, and if Usagi thought she screamed all she could, she was wrong. Her scream echoed on the walls, on an endless shrill, piercing note. The heat stung, seared, and pulled her whole awareness to a single point in her body. That tiny space of forearm, just above the manacles on her wrist, there her whole awareness stood, the brand burning her nerve endings the sensation the complete opposite of winter cold. She wanted to die, or failing that, she wanted unconsciousness anything just not to feel.
Mercifully her captor clubbed her on the head the darkness came quickly.
There was a new arrival in Cell K, whispered a busy body coming in from the mines the rumor spread quickly and fast on its heels were two guards carrying between them, a girl. She was a frail little thing, bruised and bloodied like all new arrivals and from the bandaged wrist, banded already with her new identity.
The guards stopped at the only unoccupied bunk and heaved the girl on it, she rolled and almost fell but didn't move. The guards wiped their hands on their pants and moved away, the second guard fell behind glancing at the girl then at the others with what could be called as pity but none of the prisoners saw, too busy looking away or making themselves scarce.
When Cell K was free of the guards not one stirred or expressed curiosity at the new arrival, there was nothing in her story they hadn't heard before. She was someone who offended the Queen or her court, or any of the higher ups capable of kidnapping her in broad daylight or dead of night and sentencing her, without trial, to the silicate mines.
They wrapped the scratchy comforter around them tightly as the blue lights were killed, closed their eyes and refused to be awake when the girl would wake screaming or crying.
"Who's she?" A cracked, old voice demanded.
A few lifted their heads at the sound and saw the old woman fresh from the mines, wiping the grime from her wrinkled face.
"New, is she?" The old woman said, answering her own question. No one bothered with her, it was too much effort and trouble better in their heat warmed scratchy comfort.
The old woman ambled to the girl clenching and unclenching her hands out of the cramps or rheumatism. She knelt beside the girl and studied the new arrival through the stain of blue from the entryway and saw a shock of silver hair sheared short, just below the nape of the neck. The old woman wondered at that, none of the prisoners ever had their haircut.
In the dim light she saw the face of the girl blackened by bruises and blood she clucked disapprovingly, the guards were always harsh to off worlders but they seemed especially harsh on the girl.
Gently she lifted the girl's right hand and read the girl's designated identity: C175. The girl's skin was milky and held the healthy sheen of a person accustomed to daylight. She lingered on the girl's soft skin, envying the vitality but knowing soon it would disappear in less than a year.
Shaking her head she took out an ointment from her pockets and began dabbing it on the girl's brand.
The old woman noticed the girl—no, she must acclimate to the serial given- C175's hands, soft and uncalloused, the hands of one who knew no work. Poor girl. With great care she turned C175's head to the side earning her the full view of C175's bruised jaw and—
The ointment slipped from her hand and was forgotten, mesmerized at the face before her. After half a century witness to all manner of capricious twists of fate the sensation of shock was disquieting.
…you will know her by the sigil she shares with the tyrant… Impossible. She glanced at the other prisoners amazed that the guards failed to see this mark.
The old woman who in this life was branded as H895 and who was in another life was called Anima took no came to a decision, she took out strips of cloth she had managed to salvage from the recyclers, tore the strips into two. She hesitated, studied the ashen face under the azure hued illumination, H895's lips tightened with resolve and she began to wrap the strips of cloth around the unconscious girl's head.
Satisfied with her handiwork, she sat on her haunches feeling the ache in her bones and the perpetual chill of this planet and the questions chasing around her mind that she knew would be unanswered for a good long while, no matter she knew the value of patience.
H895 watched the uneasy breathing of the girl stirring pity in her heart whatever the answers were –she will lose much and walk a path treaded with danger and death-- the girl's path would be far from easy.
It was the cold that brought Usagi, shivering and chilled, to consciousness and with consciousness an immediate awareness of sensation that asserted itself in a singular identity that she's come to know so well in so short a time. She groaned, as something jostled her sore arm, but the movement kept repeating, kept dragging her arm up.
A voice kind, old and sounding like her grandmother muttered words Usagi didn't recognize. She replied with a groan and a choked sob. Every inch of her body screamed for attention and her right eye was heavy and swollen that Usagi was afraid she would never see through them. A cold rough compress was lowered on her face a leathery hand encouraged her stiff fingers to support the compress.
Usagi's uninjured eye opened and was surprised to see an old woman crouch beside her, it took a full minute before she realized that she was being forced into clothes she did not recognize.
"W…what are you doing t-to me?" Her mouth felt as if rocks were gathered in it.
The old woman spoke, again in words that was incomprehensible to her but nagged at the edge of Usagi's mind but the old woman's tone of assurance remained. The pervasive chill was unpleasant, insinuating itself in the most unlikeliest ways her throat was filled with fog and breathing was hard and her fingers…
Her left eye widened at the sensation, of not exactly heat but warmth. Relief flooded through her body, a tainted blue leathery face appeared in her line of sight presenting a crooked set of teeth. The old woman spoke and this time Usagi was certain that she should have understood the words but her mind fell short of translating it. Usagi also felt a certainty that the old woman was referring to the suit and the cold in what might be described as sardonic.
The old woman resumed her work, tucking her arm gently into the sleeves of the winter suit. The suit itself reminded Usagi of bulky winter wear she usually wore in the coldest winter days that hit Japan.
"Wh-where am I-I?"
It was the old woman's turn to look at her askance and this time through the cloud of pain she forced her mind to translate words the woman's words.
"Sleep, child, tomorrow… work. You need rest." The old woman advised.
Usagi wanted to ask what the work was, and rest was furthest thing in her mind. She wanted to say all these things, but she drifted off to unconsciousness before she even noticed.