Daughters of the Night

Chapter 3

The male in front of me smelled like soiled meat. It took everything I had to keep from breathing in that putrid odor. Juriah never smelled like this, I thought.

My brother sat by my side while we waited for my name to be called. His leg bounced up and down with increasing frequency and vigor.

The village was nothing like how I imagined. I grew up in a sturdy cabin surrounded by a heathy forest, but the people of Kerberos did not have such a luxury. Tents coated with a slimy layer of black mold lined the clearing. The wooden frames were dark and rotten from excessive moisture. There were no grown Aspens to shield from the sun's harsh radiation. In their place were sad stumps, no doubt chopped during winter for survival. My body was numb from the cold, but my face burned from the sunlight that entered through the slits of my helmet.

The people of the village were thin, their body tissue dissolved from years of periodic starvation. No two people looked alike – which shouldn't have been surprising – but I just never imagined there could be so many possibilities. Skin color, eye color, eye shape, jaw structure, height, hair texture, shape and curvature – everyone was different. 

The contrast in health between the Elders and the people of the village was sickening. The Elders sat on a platform upon thrones made of rich mahogany – gifts from a foreign land. Marfik wore a velvet robe of blood red, Rigel's was royal blue, and Tuiren's was gold. Their hair, grey from age, was tied behind their head to accentuate crowns of bronze vine.

I did not dare to look above them where the Seven Princes and King from Aegaeon were seated. Juriah told me that sometimes the court of Aegaeon liked to watch the Battle of Warriors as entertainment.

Across the field was a group of maybe thirty women who were being punished for their rebellion during the Pool just a week prior. During the Pool, all women over the age of 18 were lined up. The men of the village were allowed to chose a wife without her consent. Those that were not chosen returned to their father's house and were shamed. Few were chosen to become midwives. The Pool had an audience similar to the Battle of Warriors, and the most obedient women were highly praised by the Elders. But the women who rebelled where sentenced during a trial sometime after all the battling conceded. Most women would be stoned. 

My stomach churned at the thought. I was lucky to escape such a fate. 

I studied the men without helmets closely, and my nose turned up slightly in disgust. To me, they were all evil. But then I looked over at Juriah and started to wonder if there were at least a few good men. Everyone played the game in front of the Elders, but whose to say they played the game in the privacy of their homes? 

Juriah made me read a lot to experience the world beyond our small bubble. The books spoke of love between men and women. Many different kinds of love – a man and a woman, two women, two men, or sometimes more than two caught in a complicated triangle. Gender wasn't a boundary. The books spoke of freedom. I wondered then what type of world these books were written about – my reality was so far from it. Maybe that was part of my purpose. To fight for the freedom described in the books.

During my musings, the crowd went silent, and I looked towards the battlefield. Juriah's leg stilled. One of the battles had gone too far. A body with no head rested on the ground, and a man stood above him with gruesome satisfaction. There were no rules against killing before the final round, but it was unnecessary and cruel.

"What happened, Rhea?" Juriah whispered. 

My words faltered. "A man cut off his partner's head." 

A woman in the distance wailed at the sight. She screamed something over and over, but I could not make out the foreign words.

Juriah leaned in, "The boy was her son." His face a sheet of stone. "She's yelling in our ancient language – my son, my son."