by Cora May
“I am Sorenna,” she told Brin as she turned away in search of something. “And I am your master now.”
She found what she had been looking for. It appeared to be a stamp, hung from the wall like a picture in a frame, directly over a spot of flames.
Sorenna came closer to her with the stamp thing in hand. As she did, Brin’s heart began to thump harder and harder in her chest, and she knew she was about to find out what that stamp was.
Instinct took over, and she turned to flee, only to bump right into the brick wall of an Anam standing behind her. This time, he reached out and grabbed her arms, holding her hostage in his grip. Brin looked at Sorenna as she approached, a grin stretched across her face and panic in Brin’s own features.
The stamp was made of metal, and, having been sitting on a flame all this time, it looked red hot. It actually looked furious, Brin thought. Sorenna held the heated side up, facing Brin, and she saw what the stamp was. It held a backwards impression of a crow in flight. Instead of being glossy black, its feathers were angry red but looked just as detailed. Inside the crow’s beak was what looked like a human eye. It was a sight most repugnant.
Brin could not hold back the whimper that escaped her mouth, try as hard as she might. She would have collapsed to the ground, had it not been for the man that was holding her up. Instead, she only melted in his arms, falling limp and dangling like she had no bones of her own to support her.
Sorenna came closer and closer. She wasn’t slow or uncertain about it, but Brin felt as if the moment was drawn out in slow motion. She wanted it to be over with—but she wanted to wake up in her bed as if this had just been a nightmare. That was her chosen end to the situation.
But Sorenna stepped up to her and grabbed her arm with a rough yank that hurt too much for the moment to have been a dream of any sort. Brin let out a delicate noise in response, something that almost sounded like a pathetic ow whispered under her breath. She wanted to curse herself for how childish she sounded. All that was coming out of her mouth now was her own breath hitched in quiet sobs. The matching tears were beginning to fall from her eyes as well.
“I am your master,” Sorenna said again, holding Brin’s arm in one hand and the stamp in the other. “And you are my slave. You will work for me, and only for me, and you will work until your debts have been paid.”
And with that, Sorenna let the stamp come down onto Brin’s soft skin.
First it was cold as ice—maybe even colder. The initial contact with her skin made Brin gasp.
Then it was red hot, and Brin screamed out in pain.
Sorenna let the stamp sit on Brin’s skin for far too long, grinning from ear to ear as she pressed harder and harder. She was enjoying the pain on Brin’s face. She was enjoying the sadistic moment of marking the human child.
Brin was too busy screaming to notice any of it.
The smell of burning flesh filled the room. The sound of sizzling skin echoed off the walls of the Realm’s caves. It could be heard even over the sound of Brin’s own screaming. After too long, Sorenna finally lifted the stamp. The air—hot as it was just from the climate of the Realm they were standing in—immediately wrapped around Brin’s wrist and cooled her new mark with its touch.
Sorenna turned to replace the stamp on the flames.
Brin stood there, still hanging limp in the man’s arms, every muscle having given out from the adrenaline rush. She was blubbering now, and she knew her eyes would be red and swollen, despite how quickly the whole moment had gone by. Her head was hanging loosely on her neck as she stared at the ground in front of her. She slowly lifted it to look at Sorenna in the eye.
But Sorenna didn’t care.
“Take her to her new place,” she told the man who was holding her. He began to turn, trained to obey her immediately. “Oh, and Orak?”
“Yes, Madam?” he said, turning back.
“Make sure to lock her up, too. I don’t think I trust this one.”
The words somehow horrified Brin even more. She thought back to the moment she walked in, as she looked at all the Anam creatures on the beds in the entryway. It seemed like such a long time ago now, even though it was only a few moments. None of them had looked pleased with where they were, whether they were locked up or not, but the ones who had been in chains looked like they had fared the worst.
And Brin could only imagine why.
Orak didn’t let her go as he dragged her back to the main room. She felt like a doll in his massive grip. He didn’t even seem to notice that she was not using her legs at all, not helping him as he led her through the cave. He took her to a bed in the back and threw her down on it.
She fell with an oof that she couldn’t hold back. The bed was harder than she thought it would have been. There was no level of comfort in it whatsoever, like it wasn’t meant for anything but looks. Even the pillow seemed to be just for show.
Orak roughly grabbed her by the ankle, yanking her back on the bed as he did so. He threw a metal clasp around her ankle—cold, despite the temperature of the room—and she listened as the clasp locked away her freedom. He did the same to her other ankle, and then to her wrists. The relieving coldness of the metal didn’t last long before each clasp began to heat up in an unbearable way, a constant reminder that she was chained to a wall.
“You’ll stay here,” he told her, “until you work off your debt. The bed you have been supplied is not a gift. You will work for that, too. Madam Sorenna will add the rent to your tally. You will be fed. The food you consume will also be added to your tally. You will do as you are told, and you will not fight. You will not try to escape. If you try, we will find you by your mark.”
With that, he turned and left Brin to her own thoughts—surrounded by broken Anam slave girls who were watching her. She refused to think about them for a moment, choosing to dwell on her own misery as if it was not shared by them. After all, this was not a misery she had earned.
Brin looked down at her shackled wrists. She carefully slid the shackle of her left wrist down her skinny arm, as far as she could possibly get it to slide, keeping her eyes on the shackle as she did so.
The mark was there, blistering already, and still angrily red. It was as sickening as it was damning. A crow, caught mid-flight, with a human eyeball in its beak. The eye seemed to be looking straight at Brin, and she couldn’t hold back the shiver that went down her spine as she realized who the eye belonged to. She covered up the mark again.
The eye was Sorenna’s.
She would always be watching her girls, always be with them in some capacity. Brin couldn’t help but wonder exactly what the eye on her wrist could see—did it have some sort of Blessing power that could inform Sorenna of where her girls were, what they were doing, or what they were refusing? Is that how she kept track of what they ate and how much they owed her?
How much they owed her. Brin didn’t even know what her current tally was. She didn’t know how long it would be until Sorenna expected her to have worked it off. Then again, the mark was pretty permanent. If she worked off her debt and was no longer Sorenna’s, she would still carry the mark. It would still look to everyone as if she was Sorenna’s girl still.
A sickening feeling wound its way through Brin’s stomach as she looked down at the chains she wore. Her tally was already too great to pay off, and Sorenna would only add to it with rent and food costs. She would never be free. She would never go home. She would die of old age in this place long before anyone could save her.
“Are you okay?” a young girl asked from the bed adjacent to Brin’s as a tear fell from Brin’s eye onto her pillow.
Brin looked up. The girl appeared to be no older than she was, chained up to the wall in much the same manner. She was innocent-looking, but Brin knew her innocence was far gone—both based on the Realm her soul had been sent to and on the fact that she was in the Realm of the Dark’s equivalent of a brothel. Still, the girl had sweet eyes. They were opal, a unique color even for the dead, B
rin thought. They seemed to be made of the actual crystal, with a depth to them that looked terrifying in the same way that it looked emotional. She had the same hooved feet that everyone in this Realm had, though hers were small and delicate and well-groomed. Her horns were much smaller than most other Anam as well, curling just once on either side of her head in a near symmetrical way. And—strangest of all—she smiled. It was a small, sympathetic smile, but a gift in this Realm nevertheless, Brin decided.
“No,” she answered the girl. “Are you?”
The last question was added with a dry sort of chuckle. No one in this part was okay, she knew. Least of all, the girls that were chained. The Anam girl mirrored her smile.
“I am Srilla,” she said instead of answering. “What is your name?”
Brin thought for a moment. She knew that her human name and her death name would not be the same, and she wondered if it would be smart to give out her human name in this Realm. She gritted her teeth but found no logical reason to hide a word.
“Brin,” she said. “How much debt do we have to pay off?” she asked to change the subject.
Her response was laughter—not just from Srilla, but the entire room seemed to be listening in to their conversation, and everyone began to laugh. The sound echoed off the walls, paralyzing Brin with its sudden noise, but confirming what she thought. They would not work off their debt. This was the punishment these girls had been sent to suffer in the Province of the Dead. Brin idly wondered what they had done that earned them a spot in here as she waited for the laughter to die off. The girls seemed to be enjoying her question as if it was a joke their ears rarely got to hear.
When the laughter stopped, Srilla wiped a loose tear from her own eye—hers was a tear of mirth, unlike Brin’s—before she answered.
“Sorenna is fair and takes down our tally each time we perform,” she said, “but it doesn’t matter, because the tally is so great and ever-growing that what we do makes no difference.”
Brin gulped hard as she looked around the room of scantily clad girls.
“This isn’t what I expected your kind to be like at all,” she said quietly. “It seems too much like… Like the human world.”
That’s what it reminded her of, anyway—it was obvious that these girls were here for the sake of pleasuring the Anam Dorcha men, but how should that be possible in a Realm meant for punishment? These girls were punished, surely, but the men deserved just as much suffering. Or more.
“I don’t remember much of my human life,” Srilla admitted. “It didn’t last long, actually. I had died when I was only twelve. And I’ve been here, chained to this bed, ever since.”
“How long ago?” Brin asked in a small whisper.
Srilla looked down at her shackled wrists.
“I don’t know,” she said after a long, thoughtful pause. “A century? Two? More? We don’t keep track of time in this Realm. I think everyone starts to, in the beginning when you first die and your mind is still a slave to time the way a human is, but eventually that wears off. The days just mold together, and your existence continues in a stream of never-ending punishment. Time ceases to matter, and you give in to what you bought with the deeds of your human life.”
Brin longed to reach out and hug the girl. Her body still looked no more than twelve years old, even if she had been there for centuries. Brin couldn’t help but wonder what a child had done that was so bad that it damned her to a life serving in a brothel of the Realm of the Dark. It was the first time in her life that she had ever questioned the system that they lived and died by—a twelve-year-old is simply too young to understand what she had done. Too young and too dumb. She was never given a chance to fully mature and develop into something that actually deserved this Realm, or perhaps to change her ways. If she had lived just a year or two longer, could she have changed her fate in the Province of Death? It didn’t seem fair that she hadn’t been given the chance. It didn’t seem fair that her eternity was based on twelve years of childhood.
And something else didn’t seem fair to her, either.
“What about Sorenna?” she asked. “Why does she not suffer the way her girls do? Why does she get to be a master in this place, branding us as her slaves for all eternity?”
“We have built a society,” Srilla answered. “Some of us are stronger than others and have earned their spot at the top. It does not mean that they are not punished, too. Sorenna has money. She has respect among the vile Anam of this Realm, and she is powerful. She suffers alongside us, but, just as in her human life, she does not care. She thrives off of her evil. It has always rewarded her, which has given her a demented view of things. She sees the pain she suffers as a necessity to her riches. She is corrupt wholly and thoroughly, to the point where the good things in life have never affected her like they did when the rest of us lived.
“Our society is built off of people like that. The most corrupt are at the top of the hierarchy, and the rest of us seem to naturally fill in and take our place. Dimonis is our god, and he gives us our initial debt. It is one that is never paid off, no matter who you are. But the most corrupt of the Anam don’t seem to mind it at all. They get so close, each time, to paying it off that they try harder next time to be a better Dorcha.”
Brin looked down at her chains.
“There are several levels of debt,” Srilla continued. “With each new level reached, you are awarded a new level of freedom—but it is never true, really. We at the bottom can see it for what it really is—no matter how close you get to paying off your debt, you are always a slave to Dimonis. You are simply awarded slave work that is increasingly more evil, along with the freedom to walk about this Realm and do things like visit the brothels where you are allowed to torture the other Dorcha with whatever turns your demon side on.”
Brin felt a shiver of panic slide through her spine.
“How big is your debt?” she asked Srilla quietly.
Srilla looked at her with big, sad eyes.
“When I first arrived, my debt was scheduled to be paid off in a decade,” she answered. “It was small compared to most debts the Dorcha enter with. By the time that decade was over, my debt had increased with such speed, I would not pay it off for another century. And by the time that half of that century had passed by… Well, I had already figured out what the pattern was. I am not an Anam strong enough or wicked enough to turn into one of Dimonis’s demons, so I am stuck in this place until the Province ends.”
“Will the Province end?” Brin asked, surprised by her choice of words.
“The humans believe that the human world will one day end,” Srilla explained. “Be that through some religious act or through some scientific occurrence, no one believes in the eternity of Earth. So why should I believe in the eternity of the Province? Everything must come to an eventual end, right?”
Brin opened her mouth to argue—the Province, to her understanding, was meant for everyone’s eternity after their time on Earth was over—but Srilla shushed her.
“Let me hold on to that belief,” she told Brin sadly. “It is all I have left.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: ADDELAI
A ddy had no control.
She was a puppet.
She was watching as her own hands lifted the golden knife once more. The Anam Solas in front of her looked so young. She had died as a child. She was an innocent child still. And here Addy was, with a knife that would kill the dead.
But this time was different, she realized as she watched the quivering lip of the Anam Solas in front of her. This time, she was far more conscious than before. She was mentally there, watching the scene unfold before her. She had to be able to stop it now.
“Please,” the Anam whispered.
Her voice was so high, so feminine, and just so tiny. Addy looked at her with kind eyes—an expression that did not match the aggressive pose with which she held the knife.
Put it down, Addy told herself. Just put the stupid knife down!
Her bod
y didn’t listen, though, and she tensed up for her strike. She closed her eyes. What was there that she could do to stop this? Maybe it was better that she had not remembered any of the other killings.
“I can tell you where your friend is,” the Anam quickly begged, bargaining for her afterlife.
The attack was brought to an abrupt halt as Addy opened her eyes again.
Where my friend is? she thought to herself. The confusion was enough to buy the Anam a little time, though Addy could feel the redness on her face as she struggled against her own body. She thought back to that night.
She had climbed into bed, perfectly content to forget the entire weekend. She had fallen asleep in her warm, cozy bed. She had passed by Chanta as she left for… where? What had the new girl at school been doing up so late?
The Anam was begging for her life with the promise of information that she was technically not allowed to give out. It was considered messing in the human world affairs, and she could be banished from the Realm of Light for giving out this information willy-nilly. She was risking more than just her afterlife by talking. Addy struggled against herself to hold the knife above her head and not to bring it down. It must have been vital information.
“What?” she managed to say through gritted teeth. Every muscle was tensed, and it took her entire being to concentrate enough not to bring the knife down. She was realizing how truly not in control of her own body she was.
“One of them didn’t make it,” the Anam said.
“What?!” was, again, the only word she could get out in response. The knife had slipped, too, ever so slightly downwards, as the wording of the news brought some shock to her.
“Back through the portal!” the words quickly stumbled out of the Anam’s mouth, realizing her mistake in the wording when the knife made its way closer to her. “She’s in the other Realm. She’s being held captive.”
“Who?” Addy managed to whisper. Sweat was beginning to bead up on her forehead. Her shoulders were burning, and the veins in her forearms were popping out now. She was losing the battle with the knife. But there was still information she needed.
