Curse Of Blood: Gods & Monsters

Chapter VI (Part II) - Epona

She was thirsty, her lips and tongue desiccated by the salt and wind, but the ache that dwelt keenly in her throat was not the arid urgency for water; her chords were raw from screaming.

Time had ceased to mean anything to her. She sucked in another painful breath as the ship pitched and groaned, the waves cleaving against the keel and bow with shattering force. Yet the ship remained sound, cutting through the roiling sea with impressive ease. Laying supine against the inflexible oak, she gazed upon the leaden sky, darkening perceptibly as she cursed the fiends who laughed and pulled vigorously at their heavy oars. She knew not if the dampness cloying at her cheeks was the brine of the ocean spray or merely the vestiges of the innumerable tears she'd shed since leaving her homeland.

Would that she could vomit the food and water they had forced into her, as they had enforced themselves, but the pale daemons would not let her die as she desired. She had rather perish by her own will than live amongst them, but this too they denied her as they had spurned her adjurations and pleas for mercy — they had none, the curs. No amount of importunity, or execrations, had swayed them, they could not speak her tongue, even if they were of a mind to heed her cries, which they were not.

There was naught left to live for. They had destroyed her village, murdered her people...and they had killed Fáelán. Epona looked to the young girl beside her, the child's eyes stark and hollow; they had used her ill and left no more than a shadow of life behind. She hated these beasts with the loathing of a thousand suns and, had they not glutted themselves on her broken body, she might have had the means to mete out her revenge. How she would have savored their horror as she drove her teeth and nails relentlessly into every barbarian aboard, riving their flesh viciously from their bones. That thought quelled some of the fire from her eyes.

Looking once more at the girl laying next to her, she vowed that she would not let them break her as they had done to this lass; like they had doubtless done to all the stolen men and women from her village — the few yet remaining.

Epona lay her bloodied, shaking hand atop her abdomen. You do have something to live for. Live for our child, came Fáelán's voice from the depths of her core to calm the murder from her heart, an echo of his life-force yet remaining within her. It was the part of him that still dwelled inside their child.

"Yes!" she promised, though her acquiescence was no more than a harsh breath. She would do it for him and for the babe.

It was his babe. Of that she was sure. She could have that satisfaction at least, that the blonde savages could not beget their monstrous spawn off her, for Fáelán's child already flourished there. Her babe nourished and resuscitated her spirit even as she thought of it nestled safely in her womb. The child of a powerful druadh and a gifted ovate. It might have been a mighty leader, but for their altered fates; and now it would be nothing more than a thrall.

No! You will yet be great; I will allow no other destiny for you than that. She believed it completely and could feel the puissant vibrations whelming into her blood as though her child had heard her, and now sought to reinvigorate its mother somehow.

You are not alone, came the tiny voice within. Epona echoed the sentiment with a tender stroke of her bruised fingers.

And nor shall you be. I will Iive for you.

❅

As she and the other thralls were removed from the hold by peremptory hands, stumbling from the dragon ships awkwardly, she strained at her fetters the while she gazed her fill. This land was so different from her own: gone were the gentle, rolling downs of morass, rocky tors, gorse and fields of purple heather. Here stood a wilder landscape of violaceous, distant peaks, a dark smoldering mountain at the cynosure, and sheer, jagged cliffs surrounding the beach. But to the south lay some sort of crimson forest that had instantly caught her eye and seemed strangely pervaded by an eldritch life of its own.