The Temptress

9

There was a long period where I laid there on the sleek stone floor of the dungeon, listening to the voices of the guards that were mere whispers. Then I heard the delicate sound of water dripping, and focused on that instead. The rhythmic sound was so tranquil in the cold musky place, I closed my eyes. I pictured the plinking noise the rain would make on the old ceramic jug my family and I would put outside the archway of our house to collect the water for drinking and bathing. I pictured the happy faces of my mother, father, and two younger sisters. I drowned myself in memories of us running through the fields with the cattle or of us climbing the oak tree that overlooked the rest of our village or of them taking turns to have their hair braided after their bath. Then the noise became the plinking sound of dripping blood. The scene contorted and their faces became pained. My sisters were crying in the empty tub, hiding from masked men up in the branches of the tree. Screaming in the field, surrounded by blood-spattered grasses and the occasional body sprawled lifeless, across the field.

Eyes flashing open, the scene disappeared, in it's place was darkness, Iron bars, stone floors and stone walls. The cold was encasing me, crawling over my legs, ripping into my torso.

I let my mind wonder onto more the more important matter; getting home. Home.

We settled in front of the old apothecary of our village, her name had been long forgotten by our people. She was known to us as Nana due to her being our eldest member, at seventy and eight summers. I sat on the dirt between my two sisters as Nana told us of stories of other lands and other times. She told us of tales of lovers and wars, farietales and royalty, mythical creatures and happy endings, but she also talked about endings that weren't so happy. She told of a land of sickness and evil. A place of lustful men, drunk on power and high on their ill intentions. And stories of the women that gave themselves to men to feed their lust. Being used as property, bid on and sold to fill the pockets of men. Nana said that this land was different from ours and that a girl gave up her virtue for a man's pleasing and not for love and after marriage, but when the man thought suitable.
She was curled into the blankets and Afghans that cushioned the worn chair that she would reside in when all our people were healthy. Her tone had turned hard at the mention of this land and her weathered face bent with her revulsion of their culture. The culture of Atlas.

Nana's story has aged many summers and I had never heeded her tales or put any stock in her words, but now, every word she had spoke that day weighed heavy in my stomach.

Desperate to elude the chill of the sleek ground, I stumble up onto my feet. The action was pointless, there was no where to go. There was no where to run to escape the cold or the dark. My bony fingers grasped the steel bars that trapped me. I shook the bars with all the strength I could conjure, "Please" I begged the stale air, pushing and pulling the bars furiously. The words bounced around the air until I was not hearing my words echoed but instead I had not stopped saying them. The pleas twisted into weeping. Weeping that refused to be silenced by my thinned hands.

Alright that was bad but necessary, I'm thinking the next one is gonna get a little more steamy.
~Mel~