Beast Bride

I was only fourteen years old the day my whole world fell apart. It was the day I learned that the world wasn’t the warm and happy place I had once believed it to be, the day I learned that humans could be more monstrous than the monsters. It was the day I lost everything.

No, not the day I lost everything. It was the day everything was taken from me. The day I first saw what cruelty and evil truly looked like. The day my father’s knights found me.

It was on that day, the day I lost my mother, that I also lost my voice. It wasn’t until many years later, long after I’d given up on things like hope and happiness, that I found the will to regain it.

I was raised in the town of Rovette in the eastern duchy of the Kingdom of Vrayna. For as long as I could remember, it had been just me and my mother in our small cabin on the outskirts of town. My mother earned money by washing and mending clothes, working from sunrise to sunset to ensure that I never went hungry.

I spent my days playing idly by the river or tending to our small vegetable garden. Occasionally, I would earn a copper coin or two by running small errands for the townsfolk, but it was never something that was expected of me. More often than not, my mother would refuse to accept any earnings that I offered her, insisting I spend them on myself instead.

Our life was a simple one, but it was enough. If I never knew luxury, I also never knew suffering. I had a full belly and I was loved.

On the day they came for us, it was an unusually hot day in the middle of summer, near the end of the seventh moon cycle. I was on my way home with three copper coins in my pocket, having just finished a very profitable afternoon of shoveling horse dung at one of the local stables.

It was hard work, and I reeked of sweat and dung, but having earned a whole copper for every movement of the sun that I worked had left me with a great sense of pride. Under normal circumstances, it could take a full fortnight to earn three coppers. The coins in my pocket were enough to buy rice for days, or perhaps even some meat.

It was early evening when I began making my way back to our home at the edge of the forest. The sky had taken on the orange hue of early sunset, indicating it was nearing the eighth movement of descent. A gentle breeze was blowing, offering me a much needed respite from the blazing summer heat.

The stable I’d been working at had a thatched roof to protect the horses from the elements, so despite its relentless glare, the sun hadn’t burnt my skin. However, I was sticky and sore from the afternoon’s work, and my body still radiated residual heat.

Well aware that I both smelled and looked particularly awful, I decided to make a detour to the river to wash the worst of the dirt and sweat from my body. Copper coins or no, it was likely that I would be scolded if I returned home in such a state.

The cold river water was undeniably pleasant on my sweaty, hot skin. I took off my shirt, wet it, and wrung it out several times until the water ran clean, then I used the sand and small stones from the riverbed to scrape the grime from my body.

By the time I was done, the sky resembled the embers of a dying fire, the last echoes of the sun before twilight officially arrived. I hadn’t eaten since morning and my stomach grumbled in protest after the day’s hard work.

I pulled my shirt over my head and shivered slightly as the fabric made contact with my skin. The chilling sensation of the cold, wet shirt was a pleasant contrast to the constant heat that pervaded the summer months.

Hungry and energized, I headed for home.

It was when I reached the fork in the road that I realized that something was wrong. The path that led to our house was surrounded by trees. No matter the time of day, one could always hear the chirping of birds, the snapping of branches, and the rustling of forest creatures moving about. Tonight, however, the ever-noisy forest was eerily silent.

I paused for a moment, listening carefully. Other than the sound of my breath, there wasn’t a single noise to be heard.

The trees that lined the path, which usually felt like they were guiding me home, felt ominous, like they were telling me to turn back. An overwhelming fear began to rise up inside me. Every fiber of my being wanted to turn tail and run. However, instead of running away, I quickened my pace and forced myself to keep moving.

As I walked down that eerily silent forest path, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching me from the trees, stalking me from the shadows. I did my best to ignore that feeling and hurried home to my mother.

Before I arrived in the clearing where our cabin was, I could hear my mother screams echoing from inside. I stopped running while I was still hidden by the trees and crouched behind to a bush, trying to swallow the overwhelming fear that gripped me. My mother needed me. I had to figure out a way to help her.

I peered around the bush and saw a couple of horses waiting in our open yard, but I didn’t see any people. They were probably all inside. My mind was a mess, but I knew I had to do something.

I crept forward, trying to be as quiet as possible, but there was no cover in the yard to hide my movements. As soon as I was close enough to see inside the door, someone grabbed me from behind and pushed me inside.

“Well, look at what I found skulking about,” my captor called out, “I’ve got the kid. We don’t need this bitch to talk no more.”

Inside the house, I saw my mother, her wrists bound behind her back, bent over the table where we usually ate. A skinny man with black hair pressed her face into the table with violent force. His pants were bunched up around his knees, leaving me no illusions about what he was doing. He paused his rough thrusting for a moment to look at us.

“Come on! We only just got started,” the man protested, “Can’t we have some more fun with her before we leave?”

“Hah, I didn’t say the fun was over, did I? I just said she doesn’t need to talk.” My captor twisted my arm painfully behind my back and forced me to move forward toward the table as he said, “We’ve got all night boys. Let’s show this little bastard what happens to whores who run away.”

The black-haired man continued his assault with renewed vigor. He grabbed my mother by the hair and forcefully lifted her head so she could see me, before smashing it back down on the table, laughing merrily as he did so.

The look in his eyes was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen.

In violation of my will, my body went limp from the shock and horror. I desperately wanted to fight back, to make them stop. But all I could do was watch helplessly as my mother cried and begged for mercy.

They said she deserved it for running away.

The sun had risen again before they were finished with her. Before that night, I could have never imagined the depths of depravity that humans could be capable of. But after, I understood. True evil had no limits, no bounds. Kindness and compassion meant nothing to men who enjoyed having power and inflicting pain.

My poor, commoner mother had once been a servant to the Duke of Ramport, the southern duchy of Vrayna. The Duke’s wife had borne him a single daughter. After a difficult childbirth, she was left barren, without hope of ever giving him a son. Rather than replace his wife, he decided to sire a son through different means.

My mother, a lowly kitchen servant, was unfortunate enough to catch the Duke’s attention. He imprisoned her and forced himself upon her repeatedly, eventually resulting in a child – me. After I was born, my mother found a way to flee the southern duchy and disappeared, taking me, the Duke’s son, with her.

For the Duke, this was unacceptable. He searched for my mother for years. He finally found her by chance, thanks to information from a traveling merchant who had passed through our town, and he sent his knights to find us. I had to be brought back alive, but the Duke told them to dispose of my mother as brutally as possible.

The black haired man told me all of this in bits and pieces whenever he grew tired of tormenting my mother. Over and over again, he told me she deserved it, and that I deserved it too. Then, he started telling me all the things he wanted to do to me. He couldn’t touch me yet, he said, because I belonged to the Duke. But he promised me that one day, when I was no longer useful, I would belong to him.

The horrors in front of me continued through the night. I prayed desperately, begging the Gods for their mercy, but no mercy ever came. I was too weak to do anything. I couldn’t save her.

Finally, I could take no more. Reaching deep into a part of myself I didn’t know existed, I found a place where there was nothing at all. A place filled with thick grey fog, where I could hide myself away.

I sent myself into the fog. It was quiet there. It felt safe. I couldn’t hear the screams there. I couldn’t see the violence.

I sent all of my pain into that dense grey fog, along with all the pieces of myself that could still be saved. I let go of who I could no longer be and embraced the nothingness, leaving only a small fragment behind.

The morning sun was shining brightly in the sky when they slit my mother’s throat and left her broken body for the animals. They bound my wrists behind my back, tossed me into a wagon, and began our journey south.