Fallen Slaver Caravan 

Somewhere on the border of Baron Elyss’s former territory outside of Yu-Bine Forest

I woke up with my stomach full and my throat bubbling up in nausea as I remembered what happened the previous night. I’d been walking along in a random direction when I thought I heard a little girl, my little Rosie, shouting for me to come help. I hadn’t had anything to eat since the doe in the forest and when I saw the shining metal armor my mind flashed back to Lord’s men guarding the tax collector and everything went red. 

My body started transforming without listening to me and… I didn’t try to fight it. I wanted to… I really did. But when I tried I would hear Rosie crying. I would see that knight's sword coming down on her hand. I would remember the feeling of self-hatred as I gave her medicine to let her go to sleep for the last time, knowing we would never be able to get medicine to treat the infection. 

When those memories came over me I let out as strong a cry as I could and just… Let the Monster handle the rest.

I hadn’t been able to keep myself conscious throughout the entirety of it but the feeling of momentary fullness in my stomach told me enough of what happened.

I slowly opened my eyes and was surprised to find I was laying on a wooden floor instead of the forest's grassy ground I’d grown accustomed to over the last week. What shocked me even more is when I locked eyes with a young woman sitting cross legged across from me. She was naked as the day she was born but her skin looked flawless, I’d have thought she’d be a noble but between the kind of caravan she was with and the metal, jewel encrusted, ring around her neck it was clear she was a slave. A high-class one but a slave none the less. 

There was something else in the back of my mind that was bothering me though, something about her smile.

Before I asked her anything though I took off the dirty cloak I’d wrapped around my body while traveling and put it around her. “It’s not much, probably smells something awful, but it’s better than having to expose yourself to an old man like me.” I gruffly explained myself as I tried to avoid looking at her as best I could. 

She looks too much like her.

It was almost five years ago that I helped Rosie go to sleep.

I bet she would look like this if I’d been stronger back then. 

“Uhmm… Grand- No! Dammit! Oi! Old man!”

I flinched back in surprise as the girls entire demeanor seemed to shift on a dime, her smile, her smile, was replaced with an angry desperate kind of scowl. Her relaxed cheerful posture slid back to a predatory one like she was ready to pounce and tear into my neck if the situation called for it. 

“Rosie- Urg, I know! The Girl, she told me to tell you thank you. She…” The woman's expression fell deeply like she just realized a traumatic truth. “She slept well.”

I took a deep breath as the monster in my soul was beating at the edges of my mind not out of hunger, but something more… basic. More human. Shame. 

There was more there, anger, bitterness, and impotent powerlessness but most of all it was just Shame.

“I know… I know.” I whispered to myself and the monster within me. Accepting it and setting it to the side. I’m not a boy. I haven’t been that young in a long, long, time. I can hear her out and get an explanation. If that explanation isn’t good enough, then. And only then. Will we pursue more… extreme options.

“You called me Grandpa and said her name. And when I woke up… that expression on your face…” I bit back part of an animalistic growl in my throat as I demanded “EXPLAIN.”

I felt my features transforming as tears slid down my cheek and I forced myself to turn away from The Woman.

She didn’t say anything for a bit, maybe trying to do her own mental exercises to talk. 

When she did speak I was able to hear a bit of fear in her voice, not at me but at herself. “I’ll explain, but it’s a bit of a story.” I scoffed but when she saw I wasn’t moving she didn’t either and just continued. “Until last night I didn’t have a name. I was a baby sold by my parents into slavery where I’d grown up in a nobles household the father, they never told me their name, he treated me as his own daughter until I turned 13 when he-” Her voice choked but she took a deep breath and forced herself to continue. I almost told her to just skip it but she ignored me. “He raped me. Every night for a month straight until his wife caught us. She claimed I had seduced him and he didn’t argue. Everyone in the manor knew what he was doing, apparently it was a game he played. Adopt slaves to young to know what was happening, convince his wife this one would be different, and then when they were able to he would.” I saw her shadow move over her face, wiping at tears as she forced herself to continue. “Anyways I was sold off after that. I was ‘used goods’ so it took awhile for someone to find me worth buying but I can read, write, and do math so it was always going to be possible for the slavers to just sell me to a local aristocrat if they couldn’t find a proper buyer but they eventually did. A knight for Baron Elyss, trying to overthrow his boss and make the territory his own. He claimed he was a good ‘slave owner’ he didn’t rape his slaves in the traditional way you see.” 

I practically begged her to stop but this time it was her turn to scoff at me.

“No, no, this is just getting to the good part Old Man. This knight, a man named, Edward Lywin, will buy slaves with tragic backstories and treat them like little princesses and princes. As long as they behave. For the young ones this is a best case scenario I suppose. The boys and the girls who are not ‘dainty enough’. Are trained to be knights under him. He teaches them all the crucial skills, forces them to fight monsters, and even gives them crucial medicine if they get hurt. For the girls he uses them for political bargaining, selling them off to other noble families like valuable dolls all the while making sure they know they owe him everything. Well some get sold off anyways, others, especially demi-humans or one with peculiar skills he keeps. He’d always say ‘I gotta complete the set’ and laugh when someone asked him about it.”

I thought of the quests I’d been given, to overthrow a tyrant and meet my progenitor. Is this what they meant? Is this man the kind of tyrant they want me to overthrow. Or is it not really what matters? It’s just the act of doing it. The Evil God demands entertainment. That’s what the message said, there really was just one question left to ask, the one I least wanted to know. “What happens to those who don’t behave?”

I thought for a second I felt Rosie’s smile shining on me as if this is the question she most wanted to be asked. “They go where all the toys and dolls that don’t behave go, Grandpa. In the Box.”

Hearing her actually call me grandpa I spun around in a haste and saw just out my peripheral vision where my right eye was still partially transformed when I stopped it, a spectral blue haze shining off the young woman and my beautiful, innocent, little grand daughter waving at me, with her severed right arm before disappearing again as my monstrous features faded away and the Young Woman’s appearance returned back to what they were as she finished her story, a painful sorrow reverberating off her.

“He would drug our food and call for us to sleep in his room, saying he wanted to ‘cuddle his toy’s before bed.’ He didn’t really need the excuse. He was our owner. We physically couldn’t stop him even if we wanted to, and most of the time it was fine. Good even. But we were his broken toys so he had to fix us. I managed to get out of there that first time. A friend of mine, her spirit found me and pulled me out of the medicated coma. Broke my arm falling out of the third floor window though. When he found me he already had a priest with him to heal me. I should have put it together then and there that he was always watching. He just wanted to keep being our hero but he could only do that if we had something to be saved from.”

“You said the first time.”

“Yea… the first time. I was pretty good at escaping you see, I would use my necromancy to find spirits who had skills perfect to solve the situation. But he managed to get around that one time, he had taken me with the youngest kids into the dungeon so I had to use up all my mana to keep them alive because he just kept pushing them. I knew what he was doing but it wasn’t like I could just abandon them!”

I wanted to reach out and comfort her but for some reason I couldn’t move from where I was. Her presence. Her story. It held me in place like nothing else in this world ever had.

“The Box… It’s not just a place. It’s a magical medical practice. He… Well from what the doctor described it as anyways, he would essentially dig into your brain and cut out the pieces of the mind that hold the will to resist. Just a little bit, never enough so that you would wake up and be aware of what happened. You would just find yourself little by little, less concerned with his behavior. You start thinking, “I guess master is just being master again…” You make excuses so much more easily but worse of all you think you're the one making those excuses. Do you know what the worst thing about being with him was though? It was wanting those thoughts to truly be mine. It was the knowledge that the entire thing was just an act. Just another sick noble using us as props.”

She took a deep breath and fell backwards wrapping my cloak tightly around her body. Staring up at the wooden ceiling like it was a sky holding the cosmos. “What you're thinking, how I was able to resist. It’s my power. Even if my body was under his control, it had no effect on my spirit or the spirits who possessed me. I was using the spirit of a prostitute of all things to try and seduce him. I had just turned into an adult, properly, and I knew there were expectations of me as his female slave. I thought if I have to do this then let it be with him and let it be as good as possible.” 

She let out a bitter laugh at the memory as she added. “I was traumatized as my will came back but Emerald was something else. She evolved into a poltergeist after that. Bit his dick clean off. Shame he wiped his memory to get rid of  the trauma, and a priest to put himself back together, I think that might have been the only week his behavior was genuine.”

She was quiet for a second so I finally interjected. “Why are you telling me all of this?”

She frowned as she leaned up and looked at me before letting out a deep sigh of exhaustion and laid back down.

“Last night he killed me. He seemed to think that this damned collar would just neutralize me and make it so I couldn’t use magic to resist him. It separated me into a physical and astral body, something about the magic involved though, it killed my body. I couldn't possess it anymore. I don’t know if it was luck or some kind of divine intervention but your granddaughter, Rosie, she was nearby.”

“That was the voice I heard, she was calling for my help when I was wandering the woods.”

“Sounds right. I asked her for help and she told me her grandpa would help me and asked for my name. I told her I didn’t have a name so she gave me hers.” 

“So your name is Rosie…” I whispered in slight confusion about how this required such a long explanation. But she shook her head.

“I take it you're not big on metaphysical laws Old Man. I guess most people aren't really… When a spirit names a living person, especially a powerful spirit, their nature can change. She didn’t just give me her name… she gave me her living will. I’m part ‘Runaway Slave’ and part ‘Rosie’. If I were some big-shot wizard from the south I might know what to do with this but to be honest… I’m just a self-taught spectral necromancer. I’m just… scared. I fought for so long to maintain ‘Me’ and now I’m losing that too and it was my own damned magic that did it.”

This time as she wiped at her eyes I stood up and walked over to her, taking her hand in mine. “I don’t know what all I can do for you… I’m a monster. I’m sure you heard what happened when I lost control… But I… It was my granddaughter who acted without thinking and… you said she slept well. I-” my voice cracked as I leaned down staring at the ground next to her. “I was a failure. A failure to my family. To my friends. To… myself. If I can do anything right let me help you take revenge.”

She glared at me through tear filled eyes. “If you want to help me because of some kind of justice then forget it-”

I shot back her glare with my own, feeling my facial features warp slightly, my teeth growing and piercing through my cheeks. “I don’t care about something like justice. I told you I’m a Monster. What monster do you know wants justice. I plan on terrifying him apart limb by limb and then devouring him full. It is the duty of monsters to take care of monsters. I’m inviting you to come along.”

She looked like she wanted to protest but instead just nodded in understanding. “Then I’ll go with you, Old Man.” 

I nodded at her, forcing my face to stay stern. Shoving the self-loathing aside, keeping that one thought in my mind. “She’s not Rosie.” I knew logically that the things she’d told me, the story she had told me had been to explicitly drive how that she was someone vastly different than my little grand-daughter but for some reason when my thoughts drifted to that man I saw him holding Rosie and felt that for the first time since I’d lost my humanity the Monster and I were on the same page.

I focused on my breathing as I stepped out of the wagon and saw the notifications slide by. 

Party System Locked

Monster Alliance System Unlocked 

The Half-Ghost Progenitor has joined your Alliance. 

You have lifted the Curses of The Evil God for as long as your Alliance holds. 

Your Quest has Progressed and The Evil God watches your progress closely. 

The Evil God has gifted you “Cursed Compass of Hunger” It will point you to the place that will satiate you. 

I felt a sudden weight appear around my neck as a leather braided necklace connected to a silver sphere materialized. When I opened the sphere I saw a vial of blood engraved with just visible runes upon that glass that seemed to spin around randomly before pointing to the south east, back into the territory of the Baron I’d been trying to get away from.

ShatteredAuthor

A bond is formed and plot moves forward. We're starting to see the forming of battle lines as the Rosie, The Former Slave and The Ghoul join forces against the tyranny of the Elyss family. What do you think of the story so far? How are you feeling about the way I describe the Monster and his slaughters. Also... GRANDDADDY GHOUL. This amuses and delights me to much.