Cylus 22nd 479
It was perhaps fitting that I alone among the sisters of my small clan, after having awoken from a long slumber that saw much of my skills dulled to the point of uselessness, had been appointed to train under the Sortzailea. The Sortzailea being the artists of my mother’s kind, not only the functional artists, the constructors and crafters of useful things, but also those who crafted beauty. They were also painters, seamstresses, weavers and jewelers. Then there was the subsect that I had been trained under, that of the storytellers, poets, and playwrights, who were tasked with chronicling the exploits of the shadows of Augiery.
Why was I uniquely suited to be a chronicler for our clan? For as long as I remember, among my sisters, I alone feared the shadows that crept in before slumber. My sisters mocked and teased me for leaving a light on in my sleeping chambers, in the clan home in Augiery’s Hive. I alone feared what my mother’s kind were. It was, perhaps, a consequence of lacking their gift of shadows. A sign of the Nightmaiden’s disfavor toward my mother, that she’d been cursed to bear a daughter who wasn’t quite a Naer, but something else.
And because I had a special fear for our kind, because I dreaded the darkness that crept in at night, and feared many things that came with it, I was uniquely suited to telling the tales of horror and dread. Of spreading Augiery’s dreadful reputation far and wide, so that it propagated in the minds of lesser races.
I was lost in reverie, in the tent at our camp, as I awaited the return of my sisters from their raiding party. As breaks went on, I became distant and must have dozed off as I daydreamed. My dreams often were a pleasant reprieve from the constant horror I was witness to. Yet they were only temporary, and fleeting. For as I was started awake by the sudden hooting and hollering of our sisters, so too came the wailing and lamentations of their prisoners. The ‘fruits’ of their raid.
I didn’t emerge from the tent then, but heard everything that happened outside of it. The screams of the butchered, the wails of their men, and the carving of flesh, the dissection of viscera. I knew the sounds well, though I rarely had occasion to witness them. Unlike many of my sisters, I rarely had much of a taste for their peculiar brand of cuisine. Often enough, I relied on what ‘exports’ arrived from other lands to supplement my diet. Still, that didn’t excuse me from partaking of the blood crop, every once and again.
I don’t know what it was that came over me in those moments, as the butchery commenced. I should have kept my head stuck in the tent, but curiosity overruled common sense in this case. I leaned out of the opening of the tent, to watch what was going on.
Scenes of horror and dread. The men we’d captured, standing by in makeshift bamboo cages, rattled against them furiously as our sisters butchered their sisters, mothers, and wives. The female children were kept from this butchery, however. They would be raised as slaves, to secure the ultimate viability of the slave population in Augiery.
I watched in mute and impotent horror as their limbs were carved, and guts stolen from them. When at last it became too much to witness, I crept back into my tent, and tucked myself in a dark corner of the canvas shelter. There to await the recounting of our sisters’ tales of conquest.