~Kendra~
I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of— was that… screaming?
Goddess.
It was impossibly loud. Overflowing with panic.
Okay. More than one person was screaming. And the chaos was coming from outside.
It sounded like people were running helter-skelter, and my first thought was that our hut—or goddess forbid, several huts—had caught fire again and everyone was scrambling to put it out. Wildfires were pretty common in these parts.
And there was smoke.
Everywhere. Flames too.
Oh, shit.
I turned to tap Mama and Papa when I realised—with alarm—that my parents and younger brother were no longer in bed beside me.
'Don't panic. They've gone to fight the fire,' my now half-alert brain supplied.
So quickly, in a bid to join them, I jumped out of bed, grabbed the nearest bucket, and ran. Like my life depended on it.
Because it did.
The last thing my family needed right now was to join the homeless few—whose numbers were slowly increasing with every new outbreak. It was a hard life. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
The smoke was so thick, I could barely see. It burned my eyes. Scorched the back of my throat. I held my breath for as long as I could—which wasn't long at all, considering my increasingly alarmed state.
Unable to take it anymore, I inhaled deeply—
And my lungs seized immediately!
The fumes assailed my lungs, forcing me to my knees. Wheezing violently, I crawled on all fours, discarding the bucket entirely at some point.
'Can't save anyone if I'm dead. Better save myself first.'
But the more I dragged air in, desperate for oxygen, the closer I came to blacking out.
I was so air-hungry. And weak.
My eyes flooded as I staggered to my feet, calling for my family.
Mama. Papa. Kofi.
I choked their names out between coughs, louder and louder, more desperate with each step that I took without getting an answering call.
Until I stumbled outside.
And stopped.
~~~~~
There was blood everywhere.
Dead bodies.
Dead…?
No.
Sleeping. They were— they had to be sleeping. Right?
My parents. My brother. They weren't crumpled at the entrance of our hut, in the dirt they had walked their whole lives.
In a pool of their own blood.
They weren't…
I choked on a sob. It was horrible.
The sight… I wasn't even sure I was still breathing.
And they were so still.
All of them.
There were more bodies as far as I could see. How had I slept through all this?
I stood there, unable to scream. The ache in my chest was intense, almost physical, and it kept building… and building till I thought I would have a heart attack. Or my heart would explode.
Neither happened.
I didn't cry. I didn't do any of the things you imagine you would do in such a situation, because my mind, like the coward it was, simply refused to accept what my eyes were showing it.
I was in denial.
I looked at what was right in front of me and said: 'No. This is a dream. A nightmare. You are asleep. None of this is happening. None of this is real.'
I believed my delusion for perhaps thirty seconds.
Then they grabbed me.
The pain came along with the rope that was bound around my wrists—not from the rope itself, but from the sudden, shattering understanding that this was real. That I was awake.
That those shapes on the ground were not sleeping.
That the people dragging me toward their horses had done this and were now, almost as an afterthought, taking me too.
I screamed, louder than the ones I'd heard. I fought. Threw my whole terrified body against the restraints until they beat me—and I understood, finally, at a fundamental level, what I was dealing with.
My entire family... My village. Had been massacred.
Brutally.
And now—
Now I was captive.
~~~~~
Several times, I tried to escape. But they always caught me.
And they taught me a lesson—each one worse than the last, every time. But I never learned.
What I did learn, though, was that they only let me live because I was "kind of pretty"—and because they had already taken what they came for by the time they found me—but that didn't stop them from brutalising me.
What had they murdered my people for? I didn't know. I couldn't say. And as they dragged me all the way back to their goddess-forsaken kingdom, far away from home soil, I feared what might happen to me.
I'd heard lots of rumours from the other slaves—ones abducted or equally stolen from their home, the other villages these savages had conquered—that I would be used as a sex slave. Taken against my will over…and over… usually by multiple men at once, until I forgot my own name.
I shuddered at the thought. Nearly wretched my guts out, but there was nothing to regurgitate from an empty stomach.
I was terrified. Told to expect the worst.
So I did.
When we arrived at Velton Pack, it became abundantly clear to me that these people were not like us. Their Kingdom was… far more advanced.
They did not live in huts like we did back home. They built large houses. They spoke differently. Dressed differently. Fancily.
And worse—they believed they were more civilised. Better than us. It made me understand that the reason they were able to treat us like animals—no. Less than animals. Was because they saw us as just that.
Less than animals.
It made me burn inside.
With anger, with grief, with a hatred so deep I could've drowned in it.
And the goddess? Where was she? How could she sit and watch all of this without doing anything?
Or maybe… Maybe she expected me to do it myself. To take matters into my own hands. Find justice and burn my oppressors to the ground!
So I made a vow that day, as I stepped foot in enemy territory for the first time. I didn't let it show on my face—my…scheming. My face had already learned, in those few days of travel, to show nothing.
But inside… oh, inside I was a forest fire just looking for the right wind to blow me in the right direction.
I didn't know how yet, or when—but I would make every last one of them pay. If it was the last thing I did.
I would kill them all.
—That was the plan, anyway.
The new one arrived two weeks later: survive first. Destroy them later.
Because, as it turned out, burning things down was significantly harder to do when you were constantly malnourished, surrounded by foes, and one wrong look away from being thrown in a dried-up well. Or a pit.
And that… was precisely where I currently was.
Battered. Bruised. And waiting for a rope to finally be sent down for me—like it had an alarming number of times in the last six years.
And if it didn't.
Well—
I guess I'd have to climb my way out.