Ravens of Eternity

Chapter 55

55 Nightmare Scenario

Amal woke up with a start and quickly looked around to get her bearings, but her sight was hazy at best. She saw that she was in a dark room, and could tell that there were a number of other people there.

But before she could take a better look, or even ask what was going on, pain suddenly flashed through her head. She felt the pounding sensation of a migraine take root at her temples, which then slowly spread everywhere.

Amal groaned as her hands went up to her head to massage it, but found part of it wrapped in some sort of cloth. It felt a little damp under her fingers, so she brought them in front of her so she could take a better look.

Her eyes had trouble focusing, so it took her a few moments to realize that she had blood on her hands.

It seemed her head was bleeding, which probably explained part of the reason why her head was throbbing.

She quickly recalled what had happened – the tractor, the fight, the crash – Dareon!

Amal quickly reopened her eyes, sat up, and searched for him.

“Dar-” she said, but was interrupted quickly.

“Shh, now,” said a female voice.

.....

Jionna quickly came up to Amal and embraced her.

“I’m glad you’re finally awake,” she continued. “But take it easy. You’ve suffered a concussion.”

Jionna gently, but firmly, pushed Amal back down on her back so that she could rest. Not knowing what else to do, she let her.

Although she needed rest, her mind and her heart wouldn’t let her.

“Where’s Dareon?” she asked.

Jionna’s face immediately frowned. Her voice was filled with sorrow as she spoke.

“He’s... unconscious,” she said. “He’s been banged up rather badly, I’m afraid...”

Amal’s heart sank. If she had suffered a severe concussion, then Dareon likely suffered worse.

Since she had woken up in this new universe, she had realized that she was tougher than she used to be. Not just physically stronger, but she had more stamina, and could take much more physical punishment.

When she did manual labor on the farm, she found she could lift heavy equipment without breaking much of a sweat. And she was able to do her tasks for longer.

But that also meant that everyone around her was weaker in comparison, so she had to be careful not to hurt anyone accidentally.

She also hid the majority of her strength, so as not to draw too much attention to herself. The last thing she needed was to be looked at like some sideshow freak.

That crash must’ve been rougher than I realized, she thought.

Amal turned her head to look for Dareon, and saw his vague shape nearby. His chest rose and fell as he breathed.

She quickly sat up, and though Jionna tried her best to keep her lying down, she found she simply couldn’t.

Jionna blinked. She wasn’t by any means weak. She had grown up on a farm, and had learned how to do every job and every duty herself, by her own hands. She worked the land just like everyone else, and shared in the burden by offering her blood and sweat to the soil.

And like the others, she was strong as oak, hard as rock, and took no shit.

But the elfin Amal resisted her like she was a frail old bird.

Amal quickly got up and crawled over to Dareon. She frowned when she saw him, and realized that he wasn’t unconscious because of their crash...

His face was swollen and bruised, as though he had been beaten badly. His head was also bandaged, except heavily.

She quickly looked over the rest of him, and found that he was battered and bruised all over his body. More than that, his left forearm had been broken, and his ribs were cracked. He was also bandaged up a bit, but blood soaked through them.

Clearly, he had suffered some lacerations, but they were left unstitched.

She also checked his hands, and sure enough his knuckles were bandaged up.

He had been in a fight. Or, perhaps more accurately, he tried to defend himself while he was beaten to a pulp.

“Buncha those goons tossed the both of you in here a couple hours ago,” said Jionna.

She had come up next to Amal and checked over her son. She tightened his bandages and checked his temperature. Then she kissed his forehead.

He was running a little cold, having lost a good deal of blood. Her intuition told her that he was suffering greatly, but there was nothing she could do about it.

“He must’ve woken up before I did,” said Amal. “And ran into awful trouble.”

“I’m just glad you... the both of you are still alive.”

“Barely.”

Amal put her hand on Dareon’s cheek for a moment, and stroked it lovingly. She then turned back to Jionna with a hard look in her eye.

“Where’s everyone else?” she asked.

Besides the three of them, there were roughly fifteen or sixteen others in the room. It was a mix of family members and ranch hands, most of whom were women. But it paled when compared to the total number of people on the farm, which reached nearly a hundred.

Jionna shook her head in response. Her voice quavered as she spoke.

“I’m not rightly sure, to be honest. I hope lots got away, but I know a bunch got... brought back to the loam. I guess we were all the ones dumb enough not to run away fast enough. We shoulda-”

She was interrupted by the sound of a rifle firing in the distance. It was followed up by raucous laughter.

“I don’t know what’s gonna happen to us,” she continued. Her voice had turned flat and sullen.

Amal understood what she meant, then looked around the room.

They all understood. They all knew what was going to happen. This sort of thing always happened. They simply didn’t want to accept it.

The door suddenly slammed open, and a handful of armed thugs stomped into the room. They were followed by a blond-haired, blue-eyed man in his 20s.

He would have been handsome, if not for the murderous, lascivious grin he wore.

“Is this really it?” he asked.

“We’re still looking around the farm,” replied one of the thugs. “It’s kinda big.”

The blondie rolled his eyes, but quickly scanned the room. He took note of a handful of male prisoners, including the wounded Dareon. He immediately became perturbed.

“What’re those things doing in here?” he asked.

“Sorry, we just grabbed whoever and threw ’em in here.”

“Get rid of ’em,” he snapped. “‘Cept those two.”

The blondie then pointed at a couple of men, both with youthful, boyish features.

A wail rose from the female prisoners as the thugs pulled the older men away forcefully. One of them tried to fight back, but he was quickly subdued by a rifle strike into his abdomen.

One of them grabbed Dareon by the ankle, and started to drag him.

Amal immediately leapt forward, grabbed Dareon’s hand, and prevented him from getting taken away.

“What the hell are you doing?!” she yelled. “You leave them alone right now! You’ve got what you wanted, right? Just take it and go!”

Jionna quickly put her arms around Amal to pull her back. Though she didn’t have the strength to stop Amal, she knew she had to try.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to lose her son. It was that she didn’t want to lose them both.

Tears streamed down her eyes, her grief plain for all to see. She knew the moment those men walked in, that the family had lost everything.

She knew that her son was already lost. Even if they didn’t take him away, his condition would have worsened. He would have died slowly, and painfully.

She didn’t know how badly he was wounded, only that he was. Part of his skull had been hit repeatedly, and was cracked. His brain could have been hemorrhaging internally; she had no way to tell. Without a doctor, he would never recover.

Jionna spoke into Amal’s ear quietly.

“Let him go,” she said. “We can’t do anything about it. Please... He’ll be in a better place, I promise.”

Amal’s heart burned. In that moment, she felt rage and sadness and frustration and helplessness. She had felt it before, long ago, and it was just as strong as this.

This heartbreaking loss was something she didn’t want to experience ever again. She had seen and experienced too much already. How much more was she going to lose?

It didn’t matter any longer. Even if they were going to kill her for standing up, then so be it.

She grit her teeth as she clenched her fists. But before she could do anything, the blond boy rushed up to her, and struck her. Hard.

Both Amal and Jionna were thrown to the ground from the sheer force alone.

“You’d best listen to her,” he sneered.

Amal’s migraine throbbed wildly after his strike. All she could feel was her blood pumping furiously. Her vision narrowed, and her hearing was muffled.

As things came back into focus, Dareon and the other men were dragged out of the room.

She didn’t bother to get up, and instead just stayed in that same spot. She felt completely helpless, and all her energy had simply left her.

Jionna wrapped herself around Amal, and hugged her tightly.

Both women wept as rifles were fired just outside. Their hearts sank to the bottom at that very moment, and there was no bringing them back to the surface.

“Well then,” said the blondie, “let’s get started, shall we?”

As he undid the fasteners that held his armor and clothing together, the handful of other thugs followed suit.

.....

~

Amal stood at the podium, with tears streaming down her face. Her hands were curled up into tight fists as she struggled to continue her story.

Her voice cracked under the weight of her pain.

“Each and every one of them violated each and every one of us,” she said. “They kept us all there for three whole cycles, and turned us into their toys, their playthings. It didn’t matter if we were in pain, or exhausted, or hungry, or sick, or broken... It was one after another after another...”

She shivered as she said it. The others who were listening were utterly heartbroken and angry and depressed as she talked.

“It only mattered that we... They only cared that we were something warm. Some of us wanted to die right then and there. The youngest ones... They could barely handle it. I think some of ’em are too broken, now.”

Eva could tell that she was doing her best to repress those memories and feelings.

But it was useless. Those men had broken that family through and through for their own pleasure. Those three cycles bore down on them heavily, and would no doubt continue to do so for many more cycles to come.

Eva marveled at Amal. It no doubt took a monumental amount of strength to endure a literal hell. And she had the resolve to pull herself together and talk about the abuses she had suffered.

That amount of bravery made her own problems seem miniscule.

She admired her greatly.

“It was only later that I found out the blond boy was Nightmare,” Amal continued, “and that he led the attack on our farm. He was paid to drive us out, because someone wanted the Laertidus family’s land. After he and his goons had their way with us, they threw us out and told us to never come back. Or they’d teach us another lesson.”

Her face turned dark, and her eyes hard.

“We took what we needed and got the hell out of there as fast as we could. We all ended up here on Helios – Jionna got us all here somehow. We’d been trying to piece ourselves back together, maybe find some help.”

Amal inhaled then exhaled deeply. It felt as though a knot deep within her had loosened just slightly.

“We wanted someone to help us deal with Nightmare, maybe bring him in, give him real justice. But no-could, or would. Like it was too much trouble to deal with. Like we weren’t worth dealing with. So, we gave up.”

And in a way, it was true. Whoever had hired Nightmare no doubt paid extravagantly. That land was worth hundreds of millions. It stood to reason that the person who wanted it had much more than that.

Literally no-one was able to get in the way of the truly gluttonous. They had no limits and no barriers and no-one could stand in their way.

Eva and Miko immediately rose to their feet.

What Amal said wrenched their hearts wide open. They knew that Nightmare was trouble; they had experienced it themselves. But after hearing the absolute depravity he was capable of, they redoubled their resolve to take him down.

“We are going after Nightmare,” said Miko, “and after hearing your story, we want you to join us in doing so.”

“We’re gonna make him pay for all the pain he’s caused,” added Eva. “By at least a hundredfold.”