The Rape Machine
Little-by-little Ouroboros emptied.
Out Strophades Corridor the women who used to be Harpies and the eldest of the children they stole from the wasteland marched. Periodically they returned, everyone who left. But naturally, they changed.
The sexual assaults began almost immediately. Sure the parties were lovely and there were those wonderful weekends back home. The Men, broadly speaking, accepted the women, accepted the Golden Children, even giving them tacit authority. But, still, out there in the wasteland, out in remote corners where people still lived and moved and grew, the abuse happened. It only took a handful of months for Sunflower to start sleeping with her father again. Like she was still ten years old.
She was strong at first. The first return trip to Ouroboros, she was so proud of herself. There was a whole list of compatible partners from the Goddess waiting for her when she got back and she had fun, good, clean, Goddess-approved fun. Fun, natural fun.
The second return trip was a relief. Her father patrolled a long, lonely stretch between Agua Fria and Arroyo Del Oso and the babbling of the Rio Grande was beginning to drive her crazy. The second time returning to Ouroboros Sunflower drank so much she had to be carried out of the valley by her retinue. They had a schedule to keep.
What made it so hard was her father was a changed man. He was older, sadder, more patient. For awhile she really could trick herself into thinking she had complete control. She wasn't a child anymore. She was a woman, an adult woman who held all the cards in their relationship, who was manipulating him and pulling his and all his men's strings for her Goddess.
But he got her. He violated her, eventually.
She was so ashamed she kept it a secret, which only made it harder to stop. Not that she stopped after the truth came out, as it had to, when she became pregnant. It took less than a year. She reported exactly when it started though, months earlier. Once the truth was out she came clean and it was a relief. She delivered the baby, alive. The Daughters took the baby and rotated it out. There was a couple somewhere out in the wasteland, a pairing guaranteed to produce a genetically superior (according to Hecate's pre-established criteria) baby. The Daughters did what they always did, take it away and replaced it with an "inferior" (one that didn't meet the criteria) baby. A baby that would die, out there, in the wasteland. A baby that would've died if it hadn't been midwifed by a Daughter. Prone to cancer, abnormal, genetic deformities, mutated. Ravaged by radiation from a lifetime of drinking dirty water. A product of incest. Sunflower's baby. It didn't have two heads but it wasn't as pretty and healthy and strong as some other Daughter's baby and so it was exchanged for another baby, product of a union blessed and commanded by Hecate, and that baby was taken to Ouroboros, to be raised as one of the Golden Children.
Not that the Golden Children were exempt from sexual assault out there in the wasteland. They were strong and they were proud and they were brought low by the world. Sometimes they were abused by the women they were grown to trust. The parties and the trips back to Ouroboros were fun, but out in the wasteland things were different. In the end, some of the healing that the Daughters of Hecate had done in the temple, with each other, was not enough. There was not enough training in the world to teach someone how to properly be sexually assaulted. It was irresponsible to claim there was.
But it was all part of the plan. Caesar died. He died like all men must do and in the ashes of his empire the Daughters of Hecate were there to pick up the pieces. Legate Lanius's forces, demoralized and wounded as they were were no match for Julia and her girls. Lanius's authority was granted by Caesar, and Caesar was dead. There was a new Caesar, Caesar Apollo and he had interesting new ideas for the new empire.
For years and years, until he was dead Sunflower would be forced to travel with her father up and down the blighted wasteland road that constituted a portion of the Empire. Ostensibly the new Caesar's emissary, actually Hecate's priestess, supposedly in control and yet subject to her father's abuse. She had more than one child by him. Hecate's Divine Will, or Julia's anyway. Because it was surely Julia's plan. And it worked incredibly. Never was there an operation carried out so flawlessly and achieving so many of its goals. The Culper Ring, The Office of Strategic Services, The Federal Bureau of Investigation could never hope to achieve such supremacy, such spycraft.
Sunflower's first baby-by-rape was born after Caesar died and the empire rose. Julia knew. She knew everything. Reports from all over Caesar's Legion, then the Empire of Mars, made their way to the Sibyls who collected and collated them and then they were presented directly to Hecate but Hecate was dead and Julia wasn't and she read them. She learned about all the sexual assaults. There were plenty of them, young and old, man and woman, old and new. And it was all part of the Goddess's doctrine, was always part of Her Holy Orders. It all had its place and always had. Instead of stealing children away from the tribes they stole them from the Legion, the mutilated Frankenstein's-monster of all the old tribes that Caesar had conquered. They stole them away from Daughters. All the Daughters knew and accepted it. They wanted it. After having done it for so long, it was worship to them. Julia called it the rape machine.
Sunflower had been a Harpy out in the wasteland. A Priestess of Hecate out in the tribes. She collected genetic samples, midwifed babies, did what the Goddess said. Her tribe got conquered, she came back to Ouroboros, had a couple Golden Children with who the Goddess told her to have children with. By the time Julia formally disbanded the Harpies she was so divorced from her former duties she didn't really care. It was just a name. For years she thought her father was dead, until they DNA matched him to her. When she was drafted into a new responsibility from her Goddess, she was ready. They were Priestesses of Hecate, they were Heralds of Caesar Apollo. They came to be known as the Juliae. That was the name they called themselves.