Her joints were killing her.
Gunda could feel the cartilage in her elbows grating together, and the ache in the tendons and muscle of her shoulders longing to stretch. She pined to be able to extend her legs all the way and stand and how long had it been since her ankles had been more than a foot from each other?
The thought of relief was laughable, had that ability not been beaten out of her. Her wrists were mounted firmly to her waist, just above each hip, as they had been ever since they had put her in that chair and mutilated her nails... two? weeks ago. Time was so hard to keep track of here. Her ankles had been hobbled since she left the rape stand her first week in this hall of horrors. That was how long ago? It felt like years, but she knew it was closer to months, if not only weeks.
She took her eyes off a man sobbing in the cage across from her and looked at her feet. They had dragged his drugged, chained body in a week ago after the previous occupant had been "graduated" on to a marketplace to be sold. She had seen the turnover happen twice now, and she wondered if there was any poor soul that had been there longer than her.
She closed her eyes and fought the surge of memories of "before" that instantly assaulted her, along with the deluge of tears they'd bring with them.
"Please, God, give me one night," she whispered. "If I can't have death, then just one night where I'm not haunted by the past or woken up by someone screaming in terror or reliving terrors myself. Please, just one night of sleep."
Someone shrieked several cages down from her, and there was the hushed voice of someone foolish enough to try and comfort them. There were microphones hidden above the cages, though, and eventually a trainer would come out and they'd have to do motorcycles in front of everyone, repeating whatever mantra the trainer came up with at a scream until they could do no more than whisper. Gunda focused on the ache in her elbows. She didn't bother trying to stretch them anymore-- she knew that she couldn't give them what they needed and to try would only aggravate them more, but she found that if she paid attention to the pain and made all the aches the focus of her attention she could sometimes fall asleep.
And so it was to the throbbing in her joints that she finally drifted off to sleep, bracing for the onslaught of anguish that inhabited the dreams of her and her fellow captives.
She was standing, which was nice, but was intentionally never allowed to be enjoyed for very long. Her ankles were still shackled and her wrists were still shackled rigidly to her hips. She had been restrained even in her dreams starting last week. It was her new existence, and she didn't want to exist anymore.
A breeze washed over her, filling her with the scent of cordite, silt, and distant trees. She opened her eyes to find herself near the top of a mountain beside a pass, one that she was familiar with from... before. Sunlight broken by scattered clouds decorated the former battlefield in a sort of camouflage pattern. She remembered being here and relishing in how open a fresh and free it felt being on top of the mountain.
She made to reach her arms up, but the cuffs on her wrists wouldn't yield. That had been a different life, once from long ago and one she'd never return to. She clenched her jaw. Why? Why must her brain torture her like this?
The breeze blew again. This time it brought with it an overwhelming sense of anticipation and, true to dream weirdness, she felt it blow through her.
"The fuck?" she said.
"Many people call them the winds of change."
She jumped and spun to face the voice. Behind her stood a middle aged woman. She looked... weathered. A greying muzzle and tired posture with typical kiman grey, cream, and black fur. Her eyes were brilliant yellow and contained so much life they didn't fit the rest of her body. She wore white, pocketless shorts and a smile across her ears.
There was power radiating from this woman, along with an air of familiarity, as if Gunda should recognize a close and very respected friend or parent.
"You are..." Gunda said.
"Your mother," the woman replied with a smile.
Oh god! Was she forgetting what her own mother looked like?!
"Magan doesn't-"
"Hah! No, child. Magan is your earthly mother. I am her mother, too. I am the Mother, or as the humans call me, the Father. I love you so much, child. I know you've been suffering, but it'll be over with soon."
Gunda stared, her mind reeling for a moment as it tried to discern how real the person in front of her was. How did one tell the difference between a dream and out of body experience?
That was all forgotten as rage swept over her, washing away respect with a solitary thought:
This person was responsible for her torture.
"Where the hell have you been?!" Gunda said. "I have tried to do the right thing my entire life, and this is what I get?! Where were you when I cried out for help when we were attacked?! Where were you when I was chained up in the rape stand and violated by every revolting person who decided to shove whatever they pleased into my body?! Where were you when I was strapped into the chair and had that fucker slowly mutilate me?! Where have you been?! I have prayed again and again for your help, I have prayed for death, for you to take this life from me, but you've ignored me!! You've ignored my and everyone else in this hell that's cried out for help. Are you fucking deaf?! Where is your sense of justice?! You can say 'I love you' but it's bullshit!"
The mountain heaved. Rocks were thrown into the sky as lightening and fire slammed into the ground around her, thunder concussions knocked her around, but she managed to stay upright... barely. The smile was gone from the the woman. Her ears were alert, her fangs were barred, and her snarl shook the ground.
She held up her hands for Gunda to see, and showed her claws mutilated just like Gunda's were.
"I was in that chair with you, just like I've been in that chair with the past three hundred and forty nine people that have sat in it! Do you think I simply sit on a cloud and watch?! Who do you think I am?!"
Suddenly the woman was a human man, younger. She recognized him as a slave from back home that she had sent to his master to be beat for carelessly running into her with a heavy shopping cart.
"I experience everything every last one of my children experiences," he said.
Now he was a human woman, another slave that Gunda had told to shut up after she had broken down sobbing on a street corner. Just as quickly she was a kiman man, gaunt and thin with shackle scars on his wrists. Then another human, one she didn't recognize but obviously a slave, then another, then a kiman slave, a woman this time, then another, the people changed so fast Gunda barely had enough time to take them in before the Mother changed again. Her voice was never interrupted.
"If you think you've had a miserable time, try living hundreds of thousands of those. Everyone of them ripped from a life they loved. Torn from loved ones they'll never seen again to be spit on, tortured, and enslaved. Millions, Gunda! Millions! Do you think I not know your suffering?!"
There was a sickly thin, female kiman standing across from her now, her own height, filthy, and shackled as she was with mutilated claws.
"I have had enough of my children treating each other like this!"
Tears flowed from her eyes as her teeth flashed.
"Who's idea was it, that to be of the 'other' species was to be less than my child? Who dares enslave my sons and daughters? Has my last lesson been so easily forgotten?"
Their eyes met, and Gunda's fur stood on end.
"I will reduce both nations to names in history books," The Mother said. "I will level the temples they have to bondage and reduce them to dust. I shall destroy both species and make them one."
A smile crept over her face, and she wiped her tears onto her shoulders.
"Oh Gunda, I have waited so long for you. I look forward to all of my children, but you and this life I have been looking forward to."
"A life of slavery until death, since you seem to be intent on not letting me out of life early."
"Oh goodness, no! Gunda, Do you feel the winds of change? Soon this suffering will fall away, and take you to a place only found through these winds of change."
"That's always the word, though, isn't it? 'Soon' as in three hundred years from now, when someone reads a story mentioning my suffering and decides to finally do something?"
"Why not you?"
"I'm in chains. I've tried and I've asked and begged for help, but I've gotten nothing."
"You got your night of peace, didn't you? And you're in front of me. So tell me all your dreams, tell me all your fears and what you're longing for the most!"
Gunda stared.
"Go on," the other shackled kiman said. "Tell me! Ask for something! Nothing will be the same after you do, I promise, for it's under my control!"
Gunda mind was reeling. What the hell was going on?
"Need a primer?" the woman said.
Gunda! Now is your chance! Ask for your freedom! Be free or prove her a hypocrite!
"I want to be free."
Her wrists fell loose at her sides. She looked down to only chaffed skin and scarring where steel had been before. Here ankles, too, were bare, and she spread her feet apart, enjoying the sensation while looking at her free hands in disbelief... but this was a dream.
"I want to be really free, not to wake up in a cage when this is over with."
The woman smiled.
"You shackles are gone, child. Your mind has remained free, and shall continue to be so."
Gunda fought to keep her bearing as a growl surfaced in her throat and her eyes went blurry.
"This is the bullshit I'm talking about! Toss some symbolic cookie and then throw me back into the fire."
"Gunda, I-"
"WHY ARE YOU PUNISHING ME?! I've always wanted to do what is right! I've tried my hardest! Sure I've fucked up before, but why do I deserve this?"
"Oh child,"
She looked like the first woman again, and in a blink she had Gunda wrapped in a hug.
"You aren't being punished. No, no, no. You don't deserve this."
"Then why are you doing this to me?"
The woman let her go and met her eyes again.
"The last time my children treated each other like this I destroyed civilization. Every living creature on the planet felt my wrath, and I don't want to do that again. This time I will release a dragon of desolation on the Earth, and it shall have a rider to reign it in once the nations have crumbled and the institutions of slavery have been annihilated."
Gunda was wrapped again in a hug.
"You are my rider, love."
"Why am I here then? Why-"
"Because you must not reign the dragon in too soon. That you must not do. When the dragon is laying waste to the providences and your own home and people are begging you to stop, you must not until it is destroyed."
"Why?"
"That, my child, is what you are here to learn."
"But why me?" Gunda said. "You just said-"
"Because I created you for this, my daughter," the woman said. "You're the only one the dragon will allow to bridle it."
She kissed Gunda on the forehead.
"Hang in there. Things are about to get better. They will be better already when you wake up, and soon they will get much better."
"Please don't. Please just kill me. I-"
The woman held her hands up, her mutilated, broken, and burn remains of claws in Gunda's face.
"You will be find, child, and remember, no matter what happens, I am going through the exact same thing."
BANG!
Gunda jumped to hit her head on meshed bars. She was in a different cage, even smaller than before, and sitting on the bottom of a stack of other cages in what looked like the back of a truck trailer. She rubbed her eyes with her hands and then froze.
She held her hands in front of her face and looked at where her shackles had been, then felt her waist where a chain no longer pinched and pulled out her fur, then to her naked ankles.
"Whoa," a human wearing a dirty, blue, button down shirt bearing shipping company's logo on the left breast said. "You got an awake one. Think you missed dosing it."
The face of one of the trainers appeared in the door of the truck. She bared her fangs as their eyes met.
"Nah, she just takes a lot to get down. It's the only way to handle her outside of her cage n' the bitch has built up a tolerance. I'm so glad we're shipping her to market."
Hurray!
He vanished, only to return a minute later with a dart gun. She didn't have the room to dodge, but she still thrashed around the cage until she felt the sting of the dart. She quickly pulled it out and was dismayed that it was already empty.
"Night, night, Shaggy Cuntfangs," he said as darkness quickly swept over her.
<<<<>>>>
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