Ch 11

I would like to say that the days began to blur together as more and more time passed as a slave of the elf Silvan but that would be a lie. Each day was a reminder that the individual that owned us as possessions was truly a cruel man and would think nothing of hurting them or even maiming one of them for his own amusement or convenience as had happened to Teka after being allowed into the house to put on and put away the equipment he used when fighting in the slave arena to make money for our master.

After Beetle started teaching me how to fight with a dagger time did not begin to move any faster. We still slept in a dark hole of a room that lacked any form of comfort. I still lacked even any spare rags to use to keep myself warm or as padding between myself and the stone walls and floor. We still received the same bucket of thin gruel every morning which Teka greedily took half of and the rest we would split between the other three of us. Even my relations with my fellow slaves had not improved at all as Teka largely ignored the rest of us and any time I managed to engage Minge in a conversation all she would do is threaten me or scream about how I want to rape her despite never having taken any actions or spoken any words to intimate any such desire or even a desire to bed her for that matter. Even if she was the only woman to whom I had access, I was too exhausted by the physical demands of my day to day life to even think about wasting energy on such things as a physical relationship.

The only real change that came as the days dragged by was that as time moved forward I started to notice, little by little, that the bucket, axe, dagger, and other assorted equipment that I used which had been enchanted by Silvan to weigh more was starting to be more bearable. My muscles still groaned when I lifted them and my body was still clearly unhappy at being made to move such large amounts of weight so frequently every day, but I was sure of it, day by day I was getting slightly stronger. This of course would not be possible without the additional protein that Beetle hunted for us each day while our master and Teka are away at the arena keeping me from wasting away on the starvation rations we are fed.

This morning marked two weeks now since I had been purchased by Silvan and brought to his home. As each morning before had begun, Silvan had awoken them to the crashing of the door at the top of the stairs as he slammed it open in the morning, followed by standing and bowing while he first beat Minge, and then violated her mouth roughly before tossing her to the ground again and depositing a pail of gruel on the floor and leaving. Minge wasn’t even fighting anymore. She would simply lay on the floor in a catatonic state until his beatings would rouse her enough to crawl on her hands and knees in front of him to be used and then deposited coughing on the floor. I think what chilled me the most was that she had stopped crying. The only time she seemed to have any life in her at all was if I approached her and then she would revert to screaming and threatening and acting as if I was the one who had been violating her instead of Silvan. I was certain that her mind was breaking. Silvan, noticing it too was seeming to enjoy his morning rituals with her less and less as she became unresponsive.

After Teka and Silvan left the house as was their usual to go to the arena, Beetle and I once more set out for the grasslands outside of the city so that we could hunt for small animals, mice, rats, squirrels, whatever we could find. When I had first come under the tutelage of the old slave, I had merely sat by and watched as he hunted down food, too disgusted by the thought of eating rat and too exhausted from working to even think about running around but today was different. Today Beetle had told me on the walk out of the city that I would need to start trying to catch the rodents myself because when the day came that Silvan felt Beetle was no longer needed, he would no longer be here to do this and I would go hungry. As such, after Beetle took off running and jumping to catch our dinner, I also started walking around the area looking for signs of animals.

After walking around a bit, I started noticing that there were plenty of small holes in the grass and dirt where small animals had burrowed and made their nests. It seemed that was Beetle was doing was running around and anytime one of them stuck their head up to see what was going on he would pounce and drag them out of their holes before slamming their back against the ground to break their spine and make a quick kill. Knowing that I did not have the speed to hunt the rodents this way I determined that I must instead find another way of catching them. I tried creeping up behind them and grabbing them as they left their holes, but it was to no avail, they were simply too fast for me to catch. Similarly, I could not seem to hit one with a stone when thrown at them as they simply retreated back into their holes again. By the time Beetle had stopped hunting for rodents and was once again walking quickly back towards our master’s house I had not managed to catch a single one.

Jogging to catch up to the wizened old slave as he made his way back towards the house I spoke out on my frustrations. “I just can’t catch anything!” I exclaimed to him, “Everything is simply too fast for me, how is it that despite being so old you are so fast?” Beetle looked at me out of the sides of his eyes for a moment, not bothering to fully turn his head to look at me and after a moment he returned his eyes to the road before him. I had decided that he was not going to answer when suddenly he said a single word “hammers.” I continued behind him in silence for a while trying to figure out just how he could possibly use hammers to make himself move faster but after thinking about it I simply could not come up with an answer and decided he must have been teasing me. As it turned out, I was wrong.