After that bad image, which I'm sure will remain with me for as long as I walk this world as part of my trauma, everything went completely blank after the rift closed, and to be honest with you, and now I'm starting to realise that this has grown over time — me always not certain on how I usually tend not to be sure now.
I must have blacked out too, because when I woke up from what I really hoped was a very disturbing and unreal nightmare, cause before I got back to reality. At first, I kept replaying this whole incident over and over again as if it was a broken record.
To tell you the honest truth, I had no idea why I kept doing that to myself, keep playing and playing the same event, or maybe I kept doing that to myself because I kinda hoped that maybe by the grace of Ney, the goddess of light and wisdom, all that must have been a game and all I had to do to escape, because I did feel trapped, was to find all means to escape so I can be free.
Duh, obviously that wasn't the case, but I don't know how I managed to wake up, cause from where I was it felt like I had somehow subconsciously trapped myself in my nightmare.
All that I remember hearing were distorted sounds and muffled sounds. I tried to open my eyes, but my eyelids were feeling really heavy, so as you have guessed, it wasn't easy, and so I had a really tough time to wake up fully.
"Where am I?" That was the first question I asked as I opened my eyes successfully.
The thing with my vision was really starting to be a problem, because when I looked around, all I saw were blurs, as if I had some kind of veil that really made it hard for me to make sense of everything.
"What's with my eyes lately?" I blinked a few times.
Not that had worked, but I had to try something. I don't know when, but after a few minutes, at least my vision got a little bit better, when I actually looked down because the muffled sounds came from underneath me.
What do I mean by that?
How can I put this, see, when I came around, I felt myself swinging around, not roughly but steady. My hands were chained up, and my clothes, the ones I had, were now gone, and all I was wearing now was a really bad outfit that looked like a potato sack but jumpsuit type.
Next to me, I saw other children; some were my age and others a little bit older than me. All of them were dressed exactly as I am, and they were all in cages held up.
I really don't know what's wrong with me, especially for a 5-year-old boy at that time; the best thing that I was supposed to do was scream and throw a tantrum.
Hey! I know what I said, but the truth is I didn't need to be a teenager to throw tantrums.
When I looked around and saw the other children, it's like I already knew and understood what the hell was going on, so I didn't react in some way.
"Odessa, Odessa, where is my sister?" That's all I wanted to know.
I know, me and her are bound to have this kind of servant and master relationship, but I was genuinely worried about her. I mean, I did look around and didn't see her with us.
Was this the feeling that parents got when they thought that their child was lost? Because that's how I felt, but in a brotherly type of manner.
"Hey, hey kid, have you seen the girl that I came with?" I asked the child next to me.
At first, I didn't see this child up until he actually raised his head to look at me. I jumped back, not because he was an ogre with an ugly green face or anything like that; the ogres of this world fell more on the side of looking like pigs.
With their noses looking exactly like the noses of pigs, and their teeth went all the way to their noses. They looked more like elephant trunks, to be exact, which, by the way, don't exist in this world — only mammoths.
The reason I jumped back was because I wasn't expecting that, and so he caught me off guard.
The ogre child didn't say a word to me; maybe he couldn't speak, or he was simply being a douche, because all he did was growl at me.
"Okay, fussy much?" I turned my attention away from him.
I looked for other children to ask, but after that, I wasn't so sure that I should ask the others anymore. All I heard was a mechanical sound that sounded like a cage had just went down.
I really tried to look around, but I simply couldn't because of the way we were so overpopulated, swinging around those cages. It was like a factory.
"So how much do you think she's going to sell for?" A grouch-like voice asked.
"I really don't know, but from our suppliers, I heard that she had just received her blessing." A coarse voice said.
"Ah, a royal? She's even cute, so she's bound to make us a couple of hundred gold coins." The grouch voice said, his tone dripping with amusement.
"A royal who had just received her blessing? No, it couldn't be." I really wished that wasn't the case.
I will admit, at first, I was really afraid of looking down because of what I might discover, but eventually, I realised that there was no point in stalling. I just had to make sure.
I closed my eyes and whispered a prayer, "Please don't be Odessa."
Hope was my number one drive. I think that's one of the things that pushed me to do what I did — the courage to look down.
And to my surprise, it was who I really hoped it wasn't — Odessa. She was in the same clothes as the rest of us, and those two brutes were actually touching her all over. Saying that she wasn't scared would not be entirely true, because she was, but she was strong enough to hide it.
"Do you really think we should be selling her off without making sure that she's of high quality?" The guy with a coarse voice said.
"What are you suggesting?" The guy with a grouch voice asked.
"Well, you know." Coarse voice guy licked Odessa's face.
Wow, I didn't think it would be possible for a human to have a tongue like that. It was long — even a chameleon's tongue was no match for that guy.
"Mhm, interesting." The grouch voice guy was impressed. "So who gets to go first?" The way he said it was very disturbing.
"Hey! You bozos, leave my sister alone, will ya?!" I lost.
They looked up and saw that I was the one who was talking to them.
"Shut up, you ugly thing." The grouch voice guy said.
"Ugly thing," I muttered to myself.
Okay, here I admit it, I was kinda hurt, and that was because I found that compliment really offensive, especially since the guy who said I was ugly looked like he hasn't seen the water in ages.
They continued to ignore me after that, and they kept touching Odessa.
"I, said, leave, my, sister, alone!"
When I was saying that, I was already mad — and not just because there were two grown men who were thinking of doing some unholy things to a 5-year-old girl, my sister at that.
But the thing that fuelled that anger in me was the fact that they thought they were more good-looking than I was.
So, I had already set a plan in motion. I was swinging around the cage that they locked me in.
When I realised that the swinging wasn't going to be enough to do what I wanted it to do, I looked at the chains that the cage was kept in balance with.
"Maybe if I jumped up and down, eventually I'll tire the chains and maybe they might get loose enough for me to go all the way down," I thought.
I had no idea if that plan of mine was even going to work, but I had to try something, right? Believe me when I say, in my previous life, I was the only child, so I didn't get the chance to have other younger siblings, but I still knew I had to protect Odessa despite her being older than me and her going to treat me like trash in the future.
What would you have done in this situation, huh?
Remember that my hands were chained at the corners of one of the most strongest steel cages I've ever come across off, so I had doubts that what I was aiming to do was even going to work.
But one thing I knew was the hope that I had, thanks to my loving mother Kelana for teaching me how to have one.
So since I was able to wiggle and move my fingers, I had both my hands grab on tighter to the cage bars.
"Okay then, let's do this." I took a deep breath.