Chapter 4 - Leyla

Pendragon house, a couple of hours after Merlin fell in the well…

Emelyn: "Jasmine is almost done making lunch… Leyla, could you please tell Merlin to come in?"

Leyla: "Sure, sis!"

Leyla went to the garden but couldn’t find Merlin. She recalled having seen him on the northern part of the garden, but when she got there, Merlin was nowhere to be seen. She even looked inside the well and shouted his name, but there was no answer, so she returned inside the house. When Emelyn saw her sister panicking and how pale she was, she realized something wasn’t right.

Emelyn: "Leyla, where is Merlin?"

Leyla couldn't stop herself and started sobbing before answering her sister's question: "I don’t know, I can’t find him anywhere… "

Jasmine: "Maybe he went out of the house without us noticing."

Emelyn: "I’ll go talk to the guards at the entrances of the village to make sure no one took him, Jasmine watch the other children, and Leyla, you look for him around the village, he can’t have gone too far!"

After Emelyn talked to the guards, one of them took a horse and went towards the river, after half a mile he reached the place were some men of Dorka Garrison were doing survival training, and, after talking to their captain, they all followed the guard back to the village to help with the search. The news of their arrival soon spread through the village and they started doing a door by door search. On the other side of the village two men dressed up in the Dorka Garrison uniform entered the village, but everyone assumed they belonged to the group which had come to help with the search, and didn’t notice anything strange.

Almost one hour and a half had passed since Leyla started looking for Merlin through the village. She was on the outskirts of the village, near its northeast entrance, and she noticed two men dressed in the Dorka Garrison uniform, who knocked at the door of a barn on the opposite side of the street. As she approached them to ask for news regarding the search, she looked inside the barn through the half-opened door and saw two men, one in aristocratic clothes and another one which had red eyes, was half naked and had a slave collar on his neck. One of the men in uniform covered her mouth, grabbed her right arm, and dragged her inside. The other uniformed man checked that no one had witnessed the scene and closed the door from the inside.

Unif. man 1: "Captain, what do we do about the woman?"

Captain: "Put a slave collar on her and have the asmodian slave have fun with her… How did the scouting go? Did you manage to find out about the rounds of the guards?"

Unif. man 1: "The scouting went well, sir. We’ve already recorded how their rounds are made and the changes of the guard… We’ll be able to raid this village as soon as we go back to the border and get the men we have in standby there."

Captain: "Good, very good…"

While they were talking, the other uniformed man had already put a slave collar on Leyla and given her two orders: “not to make a sound”, and “to undress”. Leyla silently cried while her hands moved against her wishes and followed the orders of that stranger. When she was done undressing, the asmodian slave was ordered to rape her, but she couldn’t bear it because she deeply loved her husband, so, as soon as she felt him inside her, her brain made her fall unconscious to protect her from going crazy. Although that didn’t stop the slave and the three men from raping her, she was fortunate that she didn’t have to consciously endure the process.

When she regained consciousness, she noticed she was wearing her dress again and there was no slave collar on her neck, so she would have thought of all which she had gone through as just a simple nightmare, if she hadn’t seen the man in aristocratic clothes pulling his pants up in front of her… After finishing dressing up, the man looked at her and told her that if she ever told anyone what had happened there that day, they would go to her house and kill her entire family, from the oldest person to the youngest child. As she thought of Merlin, she promised she wouldn’t talk and run towards the Pendragon house.

Unif. man 1: "Captain, is it ok to let her go like that? She might tell on us anyways…"

Captain: "Didn’t you see the look on her face? She was more scared for the lives of the members of her family than for her own life. She won’t say a word. Besides, I want to do her once more before killing her, after we’ve raided this village…"

Unif. man 1: "Ok, sir. I understand."

Captain: "Let’s sleep, we'll depart tomorrow at dawn."

Unif. man 1-2: ""Yes, sir!""

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Pendragon house, midnight.

A couple of hours had already passed since Merlin’s return… but Leyla still wasn’t back. Emelyn wondered whether she should go looking for her, but ended up discarding the idea, Jasmine had already gone home and she didn’t want to leave the kids without supervision. Emelyn showed a relieved expression as she heard her sister coming into the house, but when she asked her where she had been, Leyla ignored her and went directly to the bath. Emelyn was so surprised by her sister’s reaction that she failed to notice the void look in her crying eyes.

After Leyla stormed into the bath, she closed the door and blocked it from the inside. She could hear her sister calling her name and asking her what was wrong, but right now she couldn’t say a word, she had been tainted and just wanted to clean herself up… after washing herself dozens of times, she finally managed to organize her thoughts a little, despite still being hysterical and trembling, she was able to think straight and when she did, she opened the door of the bathroom, took her sister to the main bedroom and told her everything without stopping sobbing. When Leyla finished her story, she looked at her sister and what she saw in her face made her shiver…

Emelyn: "Leyla, I want you to go to bed and get some sleep."

Leyla: "But sister, I…"

Emelyn: "Leyla, I’m going to go for a walk, stay here and watch the kids!"

As Leyla saw her sister go out, she couldn’t help but remember the expression she had in her face when she was told what Leyla had gone through that day… And she had a pretty good idea of what her sister was going to do, as she had already witnessed her cruelty when protecting and avenging her family once before.

It had been ten years ago, when Leyla was 7 and Emelyn had just turned 17, despite having gotten married and having a one-year-old son, Emelyn had come to her parent’s house to take care of their sick mother. Leyla was really happy because she hadn’t seen her big sister since her wedding, two years before. Leyla had gone with Emelyn to buy some groceries, but when they returned to the house, they found their parents dead and the killers waiting for them to finish the job.

Emelyn was so upset that all the mana around her started running wild to the point that there was a cracking sound in the air, but that was just the beginning. Emelyn told her little sister to wait outside, closed the door and begin to punish those men. Leyla wasn’t sure of what had happened, the only thing she knew was that after half an hour of uninterrupted screams, everything went silent, and when her sister came out, she was all covered in blood, despite not being injured.

Then Emelyn took Leyla to the merchant district and stopped in front of a luxurious house. The guards tried to stop them, but they froze in fear after seeing her eyes. After she arrived in front of the merchant who had ordered the hit, he tried to flee but Emelyn didn’t let him. She shackled him with magic of earth attribute and started torturing him to death. She used little earth spikes to open multiple wounds on him, then used fire magic to cauterize them and repeated that process for almost an hour. Finally, she got bored of torturing him, so she made an earth spike go through his heart and then burned the corpse to ashes. Leyla would never forget the horrendous acts her sister showed her that day, and now, Emelyn had shown her that very same expression before going out. She knew there would be a bloodbath that night.

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Merlin couldn’t stop trembling, ever since receiving the inheritance of the orb several hours before, he had realized that all his senses had been enhanced. This meant that he had heard perfectly well the conversation between Emelyn and Leyla, and also Leyla’s confession. Merlin couldn’t stop trembling, but it wasn’t because of fear, it was because he was furious: he was furious at the men who had hurt his beloved aunt; he was furious at himself, because if he hadn’t fallen into the well, then his aunt wouldn’t have gone looking for him and gotten hurt; but what he was most furious at, were his weakness and powerlessness… It wasn’t just his aunt, it was also Sheena, he had been weak and powerless in both occasions, and due to it, both of them had gotten irreparably hurt.

Merlin hated himself for being so weak, he had thought that, starting anew, things would be different, but he had only been four years in this new world and history had already repeated itself… He swore that, starting next day, he would seriously train in both magic and martial arts, h­e would train until he was strong enough to singlehandedly protect those dear to him, but first… he would have to comfort her aunt.

When he entered the room, his aunt was surprised to see him. She turned her face away, hurriedly cleaned her tears and then looked at him with a big smile. Merlin looked at her eyes and saw the sorrow she was trying to hide from him. He couldn’t bear it, so he run and jumped towards her, a second later he had his head on her chest, while giving her a big hug. She was really surprised because it was like this four-year-old kid knew what she had gone through and tried to comfort her… but she quickly discarded the idea, because that was impossible, wasn’t it?

A couple of minutes later an explosion woke up everyone in the village. A barn had been set ablaze and nothing remained. Moments later, Emelyn entered the house, took a bath and went to her room. There she saw her sister and her youngest son peacefully sleeping while hugging each other, she couldn’t help but smile, then carefully approached her sister and whispered in her ear:

Emelyn: "I’ve taken care of them, little sis. They won’t bother you anymore, or anyone else for that matter… There is nothing left of them, so, sleep tight, Leyla!"

After saying that she left the room without making a sound and went to sleep in Merlin’s room. She chose to do so because she didn’t want to accidentally wake them up and let them see the creepy grin she had in her face right now, the joyous grin of a predator who had successfully hunted down, caught and utterly destroyed its enemy.

Emelyn thought that they should inform her husband about what had happened today. He had returned to the capital the previous week, so it would be almost a whole month before he returned home, and this matter was quite urgent, so she decided that the whole household would set off on a journey to the capital the following day. She was certain that the children would love it, for it would be their first time going out of the village and travelling…

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