Fighter woke up to the sound of screaming, the rough cheap cloth flung off of her body, her limbs flailed and her wild eyes swept the dim room for the sound of the terror stricken noise. ‘OH. It was me. It was weak, cowardly, stupid, helpless me.’ She cursed, and fell back onto the lumpy mattress.
It gave way under her, it was clearly old. “How many have used this spot before me? This isn’t my bed. I’m just using it… using it because…” She whispered, and covered her tight shut eyes as if to block out memories that swept her mind and were as merciless to her soul as the goblins who put them there.
As she lay back and her heartbeat slowly became normal again, she covered her eyes with her forearm and stared into the darkness she’d created for herself. Concealed by her self made shadows, she wondered, ‘Why me? Why did it have to happen to me? All I wanted was to be a hero… like my dad… but I’m not my dad. He was so strong… an arm the size of my waist, a fist the size of my head. I was such a f-fool. That’s what I get, for trying to be something I wasn’t. Victims shouldn’t play hero.’
“Now what?” She wondered, and another memory replaced that of the goblin laughter and the feel of goblin spend and goblin skin and goblin…
‘You can do it…’ He said to her, holding out his arms to the young girl she’d been, standing on top of a limb she had no business climbing, afraid to jump down, he stood below, dark hair hanging down behind his neck and gentle brown eyes staring up at her, his arms outstretched to catch her when she jumped, and he encouraged her to do so.
She’d done it, he’d been right.
The smell of his sweat and the feel of it against her skin when he’d caught her and held her against his chest, had never left her mind. It was as fresh as the sunlight that began to peek through the window of her room.
She lay in bed and didn’t move. How much time passed was measurable only by the slight trace of light over the floor as the sun rose higher in the sky.
Eventually a small tray slid through a slat in the bottom of the door just over the floor. “Come out when you want to. Nobody will force you. But on the fifth day if you feel hot, pull the rope beside your bed.” Swan Mother said from the other side.
“Mhmmm…” Fighter grumbled and rolled over onto her side. She ignored the food, rising only when thirst compelled her to at least go for that. The tray had a small pitcher of fired clay, a similarly crude wooden cup, some simple bread and cheese, along with a simple small apple. Filling, but crude. Her stomach didn’t so much as growl at her.
She took up the pitcher and cup and returned to her bed, then lay there not moving at all. All day.
And the next.
With nothing but a few sips of water, she stared emptily up at the sky, touching her belly again in terror, weeping and catatonic by turns.
It was the fifth day for Fighter, the fifth time she’d seen the sun creep across the simple stone floor beside where she lay, and she began to wail. Tears ran down her cheeks.
A burning heat like a fever was rising through her body. She punched the wall, shattering the bones of two fingers like they were made of glass, she howled in misery and with her other hand, reached for the rope and began to ring it.
“Why?! Why?! Why?!” She shrieked again and again with every desperate and furious yanking of the rope.
She felt the cracked, somewhat shredded strands, ‘How many before me tugged on this rope…’ She slammed her head against the wall, as she did so, her eye came close enough to see a very faint spot of red on the dark stone wall, instant understanding struck her. ‘At least one other.’ She thought, and held her head to the place she’d struck, staring at the spot that belonged to some unknown sister in misery. ‘Did you die there? Did you suffer…?’ She shed bitter tears again, granting one eye for herself, and another for the owner of the bloodstain she discovered.
She punched the wall again with the same hand as before while still yanking the rope. “Get it out! Get the goblin out of me! It’s inside me again! Take it out! It hurts! It hurts! I hate it and it hurts!” She shouted until the door opened. She didn’t look to see who had come for her.
“There there! There there! There there!” Swan Mother said as she rushed over to touch the shoulder of the dark haired adventurer. She pulled Fighter away from the wall.
“It’s alright, we’ll kill it. We’ll kill it.” She whispered into Fighter’s ear. “You don’t even have to look…” Behind her a small tray was carried in by a dainty looking woman with burn marks over her face and part of her skull.
When Swan Mother took her chin in hand, she turned Fighter’s face so that she saw the new arrival.
‘Goblins.’ Fighter thought, and reading her mind, the burnt woman nodded slightly. Her blue and white dress was as vibrant as the rest, and it made the dark wooden tray stand out all the more. On it was a simple teapot and an empty cup. In the woman’s free hand was a slightly oversized bucket.
Swan Mother drew Fighter over to the bed and sat down, she gently took the hard hands of Fighter into her own, holding with such tenderness that she avoided the damaged hand and went straight for the wrist, so that the palm was not even hurt by the touch.
Fighter moved like a doll animated by a child’s hands, and after a pair of half steps, she allowed herself to be drawn down to the bed as well.
Swan Mother reached for the pot, poured it into the cup, and holding it in both hands, she extended it to Fighter.
“Drink, and we will purge the seed of evil.” She whispered in a hard, savage voice, the first of its kind that Fighter had heard since coming to the convent.
Fighter took the cup and stared down into the dark liquid that was colored like the bark of an oak, and then up at the Swan Mother. Her eyes lingered on the long brutal scar. “Yes… me too. But don’t worry, I won’t leave you alone… I’ll stay with you through the pain.” The dark haired woman who styled herself as a mother, whispered with gentle breath to Fighter’s ear, and accepting the touch and promise that she would not be left alone, Fighter took up the cup and drank it down in a single gulp.
She immediately began coughing, hacking, and slapping her chest. “Bitter!” She gasped out.
“I know… I know. I’m sorry…” Swan Mother replied, and took the bucket from the other woman before placing it on the floor at the foot of the bed.
She then got onto the bed behind a confused Fighter, and straddled her, so that her legs were on the outside of Fighter’s own.
“Listen to me… in a few minutes, that burning is going to feel worse, it is going to ache, hurt, you will feel sick. But you must keep your head up, you don’t want to see… believe me, you don’t. Keep your legs wide apart, your body will sicken greatly, and then, you will…” She bit off her words like she was chewing through tough meat, “pass the seed of evil out of your body, it will fall into the bucket, all of it, and we will dispose of it, or in some cases, them.”
Fighter began to sob and let herself lean into the enfolding arms of the Swan Mother, but her sobs faded to tears that fell like a gently falling rain, “Put yourself somewhere else, anywhere else, try not to think, treat it like any other illness, I will hold you to the end!” Swan Mother exclaimed into Fighter’s ear, the warmth of her arms around Fighter’s body as comforting an embrace as it could be.
Fighter tried not to think of it when her body began to convulse slightly, she tried to think of something else. A triumphant moment, standing over Warrior when they were children. Her hand extending out to him. “Get up, if you can hit as hard as you can fall, we can be friends.”
He’d cocked his head up at her, then scrambled to his feet and socked her straight in the eye, knocking her to the ground. A flash of a brilliant smile and two matching black eyes, and a friendship was born.
She felt the burning heat in her body get worse, and she began to gasp, she could feel the convulsing begin to localize where a child would rest inside a mother’s body. ‘Kill it! Kill it! Kill it!’ She screamed at the corpse.
...Another memory, chasing a goblin away from the village with Warrior when they were barely twelve. It had run from their thrown stones and brandished knives… the goblin squealed and fell many times as they chased it, their stones flew through the air, scattering goblin blood into the dirt whenever they broke the skin.
Warrior whooped in triumph when it fell down an embankment, rolling and howling in pain when Fighter’s well timed and impossibly perfectly thrown stone shattered it’s kneecap on the way down the hill.
...Fighter stared up at the ceiling when she felt her womanly sex opening to pass the wretched spawn. She gasped at the burning sensation.
“You may have several… don’t look down until I say.” Swan mother whispered… but Fighter kept her mind elsewhere.
The goblin kept trying to crawl away when they half ran, half fell down the embankment after it, Warrior stumbled more than once, and amazed Fighter each time when he just got back up, indifferent to bruises and seeming impossibly valiant as he came after the goblin with a little knife held high.
The goblin screamed when Fighter kicked it in the ribs, Warrior cut off its hands and feet, then held up the limp but living body. “Get some real practice in!” He said excitedly, his sharp hunter’s eyes looking strong and proud, like a man, not like a boy in that moment. ‘We’ll take on the world and win, one day… he’s so like his father… just like I’m like mine…’ It was the first stirring of more than childhood games inside her breast. He held the goblin up, and let her beat it to death.
When it stopped moving, he dropped it in a heap.
“Of course, we have to be sure.” She said, and picked up a rock, then tossed it to him. She took up one of her own, and pinning it down by one arm each, ‘just to be sure’ they shared a lingering look, raised their stones together, and brought them down in unison on the bald goblin head until there were bits of brain scattered in the grass.
Her gasping from the exertion of the kill, that memory of the moment, just before Warrior saw her as more than just a tough village girl and like the woman she was starting to become, that moment of his first bold manly move, when he’d kissed her in a fumbling way between childhood and manhood, told her what she’d known until his last day. ‘We’ll take on the world together… and become legends…’
That afternoon, her father and his had come together for dinner and Warrior boasted of their kill, and their shared desire to become adventurers.
Both fathers gave a hard thumbs up and flashed matching grins, and said together, “You can do it!”
She was brought back to the moment by the sound of a ‘plop’ as her first child, her son, a goblin, was born into the bucket. Not the one she wanted to raise to greatness one day… but the seed of evil that had gotten to play with her a dozen times or more before she lost all will to do more than breath and stare naked and hot and frightened at the stone sky in the darkness, reaching desperately to hold on to the severed hand of her oldest friend and until then, only living love.
“Warrior… you died for nothing… you should have been a dragon slayer… you should have been a man, a great man… not…” She heard another plop as another of the children she bore plopped into the bucket after sliding out of her with a sickening squelching noise.
“Do you feel anything more…” Swan mother asked gently as Fighter looked up into the ceiling and saw only the better days that birthed her nightmarish present.
“One more goblin is inside me… get it out…” Fighter closed her eyes, “I can’t…”
Swan Mother’s fingers probed the entrance of Fighter’s body, “I will be gentle, just… don’t look…”
Fighter nodded urgently, “Get it out! Just get it out and kill it!” She whimpered.
The fingers dug into her body, probing for what they wanted, then pinched, and sharply pulled.
A third, loud plop fell into the bucket.
“That one… would have been a champion…” Swan Mother’s words were but a whisper, meant only for herself, but Fighter’s sharp ears caught them, and filled her only with rage.
“Burn them. Burn the babies… I don’t care if they’re breathing, I hope they are, burn them, kill them… stab them… but make them die…” Fighter half hissed and half begged.
“Yes… with the others… you were not the only. You are just the last…” Swan Mother’s voice was dark with promise that just one more time at least, Fighter would see goblins in pain.
“Just rest for now…” Swan Mother whispered and stroked the dark hair that hung down Fighter’s back. “You did fine, you’ll kill three more, and then every Goblin that has known your body, will be gone forever, and you’ll be alive. You’ll be alive, and they’ll be dead.”
Fighter nodded numbly while Swan Mother moved away from her, back to the front of the bed and took up the crude bucket, the last cradle of the goblin babies.
