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Sloan's Story part 12 - The Pen


jfraser

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She had seen the Riften slave pens one time, when she and a few of the other girls from the Vixen had taken a trip to the seedier part of town on their day off. They had felt so bold as they peeked over the wall at the rows of corrals, like pigpens except with huddling chained human figures. They had been shooed away, giggling, by a mock-angry guard. It had never occurred to Sloan to wonder where the slaves came from, and had she thought to wonder, she would have guessed they were convicts or war criminals. Not innocent people who were yanked off the road.

 

The reality of the pens was much worse than her giggling younger self could have imagined. The pervasive stench of human waste - which she added to moments after they were shepherded into their pen, squatting against a corner post to release all she had held during the journey - was dwarfed by a blanket of fear as palpable and thick as fog. She imagined the fear would dissipate over time as they became more accustomed to their surroundings, but the opposite turned out to be true. All through the dark night, as they tried to sleep on the packed ground, and all through the next day as rain swept away the feces along with the worst of the smell but left them mud to sit or lay in, the fear multiplied, spurred on by the sounds of whips and screams and rattling chains. They watched in fascinated horror as a huge man four pens down roared and attacked the guards, downing two of them with massive fists before falling himself from a flurry of crossbow bolts that embedded themselves in his exposed flesh.

 

There seemed neither rhyme nor reason to the selection of which pen was herded through the doorway on any particular day. Entering the fourth day since their arrival in Riften, most of the other pens had been emptied at least once, including the one directly across from them, which had received a new batch of prisoners who had been shuffled back out of the pen and through the door after only an hour of waiting. The air of fear took on an edge of paranoia for her small group. They murmured among themselves whenever the guards didn't seem to be paying as much attention, and there were as many theories as there were captives: they were deemed uglier than usual (the proponents of this theory either took offense at the idea and actually modeled themselves for the daily groups of prospective buyers as they passed or were grimly pleased and did their best to look as muddy and undesirable as possible at those same times); they were being saved for a special event (the events discussed were as varied as the theories themselves, and ranged from horrifying (fed to beasts in a public display!) to optimistic (determined to be innocent, they would be set free!) to surreal (used as human furniture for some rich, eccentric playboy!)); the pens were chosen randomly or based on some strange algorithm that they had no way of determining.

 

This last was Sloan's personal belief, but she didn't voice an opinion, or say much at all. There seemed little point in the debate. Whatever the reason, they were trapped in the worst possible limbo. They weren't yet slaves, which was good, because who wanted to be a slave? But they weren't free, and nearly anything was better than living day to day in a muddy pit eating stale bread and tepid water and shitting in the corner that most sloped away (as if it mattered - the overflow from the many pens up-slope from them gave them a constant deluge of other people's waste). Whatever the truth - and she never did determine what that was - on the sixth day since their arrival, the guards opened their pen and herded them at long last toward the door that so many others had entered before them. The closer they got to it, the bigger and darker the passageway it opened upon seemed, until they, as a group, instinctively slowed their steps and leaned away, suddenly nostalgic for the halcyon days of living in the pen. Only via shouts and the bite of whips in the air near their faces - the guards seemed to wish to avoid leaving marks, this close to auction - were they cajoled into stepping over the threshold. Sloan, trailing the line, was the last to pass through the door, and when it clanged shut behind her, it sounded like a bell tolling the end of days.

Edited by jfraser

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