Beginnings

For this I was told in detail what happened and I then decided to take a good deal out. It’s highly inappropriate. That kind of crazy shit happens but just a skim over is all you need. For. That. And… I believe the participants deserve a terrible horrible death and they got a lot less than they deserved despite their no longer existing after their one pitiful lifetime.

When I say terrible and horrible, I mean I would do the same to them as I do to people who try to kill the gods.

As we go through the story there are a few bits that, if you've read Partners and Sequel, you will notice about Una. (if you haven't read them, I suggest it for amusement factor but this is meant as a stand alone story)

For starters, this entire thing.

When writing Una I always try to reread multiple times, trying to find all the bits and fix them before the chapters go up. I always worry. Because really, who's to say how an immortal with millenia behind him would talk? How would he view the world? I try.

I know the beginning of Una's life is pretty... bright... for Una, still crisp, it's the stuff in between to getting him to be Una instead what the below makes him into that might end up a bit odd.

Read, Review and Enjoy.

Edited for three mistakes and my forgetfullness as per the warning.

WARNING: GRAPHIC.



The events leading up to that moment are blurry. I know that a merchant and his … friend, let us say, came into the village trading inks(and thus dyes but I did not know that the one had to do with the other until later). They happened to arrive on my sister’s marriage night and there was a feast and drinking. I believe, without certainty, that the friend slipped something into my drink. I recall having a conversation with the young man and that was my last recollection. My last clear recollection.

It was not my first time drinking and my metabolism at the time did not allow me to get drunk. My body consumed and burned through the alcohol too quickly. Though ‘alcohol’ then would likely pass as a child’s drink later on in my life.

I likely flirted with the young man. For several months before the incident I had found an ache in the pit of my belly. A fire that did not want to go away, no matter what I did. A craving for something more than the flash of an ankle or a kind smile. My father told me it was the beginning of a change, that when I was a man I would come to understand what that feeling meant and why it was happening.

He was so full of shit. I still don’t know what that feeling means and sex is not always the answer to it. But I was just his son and he was my father, thus he was the wisest man I knew.

So I drank and I flirted, thinking I was ready to become a man, to move on into adulthood, all the while never fully understanding what it meant to be a man. What it meant to take one’s fate into one’s own hands.

And some how I ended up outside of the village limits in a place where I knew people rarely went to, to where the merchants camped out and stayed at. When I awoke my head hurt and my mouth was dry. Muscles ached in a multitude of ways and in the manners that suggested that I had consumed a hallucinogenic drug.

I was tied by my hands to a stake driven into the ground, pushed over the fallen log that separated the camping area from the rest of the land. It was a large log and I, while being tall for my family, hardly covered the log. The purpose of this position was to push my buttocks into the air, giving better access. My first conscious thought was not about being bound or being across the log, but it was the fact that I was naked. That the bark of the log was harsh under my stomach in the places where the outer skin of the trunk clung stubbornly to dead wood.

The day was overcast. Air chilly and not a sound from the forest around me and the grass under my feet and hands was damp. Even as I awoke they waited. Patiently, calmly, they waited until they were certain that I was aware, before they mounted me. First one, and then the other.

How I screamed.

Not in pain, no, but for more, thrusting my hips back and acting like a bitch in heat. I blamed drugs, then I blamed myself that it was my own fault I had ended up in that place, in that way. Like so many victims I came to hate myself, not just for being weak enough to be raped, but to enjoy it. My body betrayed me each time they mounted me and.

…

…

…

I. I would rather not get into the details of what they did to me. What they put into me and how they raped my body, mind and soul. Even after all this time, I cannot talk about it without the fear welling up again. Long dead they are, soulless creatures and thus never to walk the world again, but I still fear that they will walk out of the darkness to claim my body once more.

Even having changed so much… I am still that young boy.

For three days they did as they pleased with me. Then the merchant went to the village for a visit and returned in a rush. His friend had just finished with me. No names, neither of them ever used names. Now I know that such a happening was in my favour. They did not want me spreading the word that a merchant by this name selling these goods had raped me. Word spread quickly when a name was involved.

And word had spread that I was missing. A boy had stumbled in my absence and broken a leg. He died of fever the third morning, the morning that the merchant went into town. My grandfather and the priest both concluded what any man of logic would at that time. I was a lucky piece, a person who carried the love of Mother and of nature and thus, one needed and wanted by any village. If harm had come to me, then harm would come to the village for not protecting me. It had not taken long to convince the other villagers, bless their souls.

But the very search party that was meant to save me, sealed my fate.

The merchant packed up as his friend had me one last time. As I thrust backwards against his hips, moaning and wanting more and more. A fire burned in my stomach and the need and desire to be had rose with each thrust like a rising tidal wave. He came inside me and there was little I could do but whine as he withdrew. To thrust my hips back and meet the cold air of the morning and a quick slap on the ass.

A friend moved towards the merchant.

In a moment of clarity, I struggled against the bonds, wondered if anyone would hear me if I screamed. The coarse rope they had used to tie my wrists had long ago bitten into the skin and blood adhered the rope to my wrists. My stomach was a net of scratches and my knees must have been worn and bleeding for how much they burned under me. My ass burned, that I do recall, not like my knees and not like the fire in my stomach that drove me on. No. This was the burn and ache of being torn and an infection lacing its way through my body.

Driving my metabolism. Seeping into my blood. Like termites burrowing deeper into wood, so the … what do civilizations call them… bugs? Of infection drilled into existence.

I had a few brief moments to struggle, an attempt to free myself without thought and through instinct alone. Then the leather belt was looped over my head. My eyes saw brown and didn’t comprehend, even as the tough leather bit into my throat, digging deeper and deeper. Cutting of my air supply.

Tell me. Have you ever suffocated?

No. No, of course you would not have. A pressure built in my chest, beginning almost immediately as I tried to suck air through a closed off passageway. Right in my chest, in my lungs. Hold your breath. It was like that for the first moment. Holding my breath is all it was. Until I realised that I could not draw in another breath. That was when the panic welled up, as the breath pushed against my throat, trying to get out. As the odd sensation moved across my lungs and felt almost like burning, yet still like my lungs were expanding. Oxygen deprivation, civilizations call it.

I could feel my heartbeat in my cheeks, in the backs of my legs, heat filled my face as I tried to bring in another breath, even though I would have realised by then that it was futile. Then the heartbeat at the base of the ribcage, the diaphragm as the burning reached my throat and my body begged and begged for air.

I began struggling, of pulling at my bonds and trying to twist away. But with the increase of burn through my lungs and body I found my energy draining. The edges of my vision darkened but still I struggled. When you are fighting for your life, your body ignores the fatal damage, for the body instinctually struggles to go on. My body ignored the agony as my wrists broke, both of them, as wounds were opened anew. My belly was pierced, I knew even then, by an out thrusting branch that had been broken off the logs years before. The body will fight to survive, long after a person is fatally wounded.

And so I struggled.

Even after something in my throat broke. The blossoming pain and the sound alerted me. An echoing snap and nothing else could compare. In all my years of life, I have never experienced such pain again.

My life was choked out of me with a cheap leather belt by someone who was “just having a bit of fun.” His words.

When the thing broke in my neck, I gave in, perhaps there was nothing left in my body to fight with. I collapsed against the leather belt and he held me there an extra moment before letting me drop back to the log.

Perhaps it was me, perhaps it is something every people goes through as they die. But I was aware.

I felt as they grabbed me by my ankles, one to each, I felt the thump as my body slid off the log, limp, and struck the cold, un-giving ground. Never unforgiving, no, the ground and rock bellow me seemed ever more aware of my plight and never did I feel that someone, something, beyond me was capable of having caused this in me. To happen to me. Never once did I blame others. Well. Besides the two involved.

And for that I am a bit of a rare case.

They dragged me across the ground, across branches and over rocks, down a way I do not think I was ever through during my childhood. There was a river that wound through, by my home village. It did eventually dry up and change as so many other geological landmarks did. By the time it did, though, it cut a deep ravine through the lands. Against the cliff the river carved out, on the very spot where my village stood, to the spot I return to time and again.

Cayallista was built thousands of years later.

I have come to believe that when Ayato went in search of his promised land and he came across the ancient forest that no man dared trek through, that which he was truly drawn to was the fear of the place. My village, after my death… well… nothing good happened there until Ayato stepped foot on the land and proclaimed to Mother, in her own tongue, that he claimed this land as refuge and sanctuary for all those She holds dear.

As it was, those two men did not understand what they did and did so for the pleasure of it and to hide their tracks. The pair of them had their packs with them as they dragged me, complaining loudly as they went; about the weight of the bags and of my body. Apparently unto death I was as a laden stone. They pulled my body several minutes. The entire time I saw blackness and I was unable to control myself but I felt everything. I heard everything. I felt how my skin tore on rocks and roots, how my ribs cracked over a particularly steep drop.

So while I was aware, in a way, I still had no idea where I was being taken to. Simply… existing and slowly fading. Ever so slowly.

My last conscious thought was being dropped into the cold, frigid waters of the River Harreel. Of the water going over my head and a startling thought.

No. Do not die. Not yet.

.