The Sentenced, Chapter 1

Thread 3, Part 2:
Laurel

The Sentenced

(there) - thousands of years ago


The morning sun was shining on Laurel when she opened her eyes. She pulled her face from the ground and spit chunks of earth from her mouth. The muscles of her shoulders were burning. She attempted to reach with her hand to wipe the dirt and small pebbles from her forehead, but her wrist quickly met with resistance and her arms remained as they were, behind her back. When she pushed her wrists down, she felt a relentless pull at her neck, a squeezing at her throat, which ignited a series of dry coughs causing her to bend forward until her head pressed into the ground. Her elbows were forced to bend a bit and she felt a line of hard, smooth weights press painfully into her back.

She let out a cry and struggled up onto her bare feet. Her leather boots had been taken. There was a cold rattling sound, heavy links of chain snaked through the dirt behind her, which after ten meters or less disappeared into a boulder half again taller than she and twice as wide.


She wrenched her arms towards her side as best as she could. Cuffs, metal and covering almost half her forearms, were locked together with no more than five centimeters between them, held together by strong links of chain. The chain from her boulder anchor linked through the central link of the wrist chain and on up to a staple on the back of her new collar, restricting her hands in the small of her back, disallowing her to lower her hands any further than the waistband of her leggings.

Laurel staggered away from the boulder until she felt the weight of her anchor chain pull at her wrists, the links clinking together. She leaned against the chain until she tipped forward, straining. Air rasped in and out of her lungs. Her chest rose and fell, her leather kandys hanging loosely. Wisps of hair blew around her face in long darkened tangles. Laurel looked out past the smoldering remains of her captors’ fire, down along canyon through which she had run, and into the miles of endless wilderness. Her captors were gone, probably already back at Axpaire's Hold a hundred kilometers away. Laurel dropped heavily onto her knees. They would never come back. And even if they did, these cuffs, this collar, they had no key. They were never meant to be removed. Ever.

“Fuck!” Laurel screamed. Her voice, muted by the breeze through the fir trees, fell from the slopes to a terrain bereft of other Wom or any who might care.

She wanted to try and think of ways to escape the chains that held her. She wanted to sit and brainstorm. But, she couldn’t. Not yet anyways. Axspaire had a reputation for this type of thing. She was practiced at the art of abandoning problematic people in situations just like this. What chance would Laurel have to escape? Resignation would set in hard and fast. Acceptance would follow soon after. How could she have been so fucking stupid? Laurel knew that she risked a fate such as this the moment she decided to scale the walls of Axspaire’s Hold. She shook her fists as best she could behind her back and listened to the song of ringing metal.

Laurel looked out across the landscape. The sparsely placed trees around her quickly gave way to scrublands affording her a view far, far to the distant horizon and all was comprised of wilderness. People did not travel this direction. There was never a reason to. And, every day, the Meridian of Life moved further and further from her, pulling with it the bulk of the population. With each year, with each century, the odds of contact would continue to diminish. Only adventurers and fools would venture towards her. And even in the minute chance that she were found, what could her saviors do? The chains that Axspaire used would not be broken. The boulder to which the chain was anchored would not crack. Axspaire would have made sure of that as well.

Laurel looked at the trees around her. She knew that now she was fated to watch them grow old and fall, replaced by saplings. She would watch the edge of the canyon creep towards her as water slowly washed the mountains away. For Wom were not like all other forms of life. They were divine. They were immortal, eternal. Unlike the fauna of the forest which would prey and feed, she would remain year after year, chained to this rock.

Even in the face of immortality, there were varying degrees of survival. Laurel made a quick inventory of her tether’s range and saw a number of edible plants. But they would not always be available. There would be many lean times. It was inevitable that she would slip into Clairambulance, a state in which one absorbed just enough energy from her surroundings to carry on.

Clairambulance was a spartan existence. But worse, the transition into Clairambulance was distinctly unpleasant. It was an emotionally disturbing experience punctuated by corporeal longings, extreme hunger, and thirst. Laurel was not sure if she could voluntarily submit herself to such a state when there was food available. She looked down through locks of twisted hair at her waist. Her tight leggings were held on with a thick leather strip, bound about her with a tangled and confused knot held several centimeters below her navel. The knot sat tightly, deformed, cruel in its indifference and the belt was far too tight to pass over her narrow waist.

Laurel stood and tried to wrench her arms around from behind her back, but her fingers flailed helplessly far out of reach of the cruel knot. She tried to lay on her back, a particularly painful position with her weight balanced on her arms and the thick chain. Finally, she kicked out a small trough in the dirt using her heel, a slot for her arms to lie in, and she rounded her back kicking her legs over her head, attempting to take the knot in her mouth to chew on it. Unfortunately, she could only barely touch it with her outstretched tongue.

Laurel was able to reach a number of small trees. She found one with a limb at about the right height and, with a bit of effort, pulled the limb off close to the trunk. She walked up to the tree and, standing on her tiptoes, she tried to loop the leather strap over the remaining nub of the limb. She was not quite tall enough.

She tried jumping, and on the third attempt the nub slipped under the strap, gouging and scraping the soft, sensitive flesh of her abdomen. Unfortunately, when the strap settled around the base of the broken limb, her legs were not quite long enough to touch the ground and she swung backwards, cursing, with her legs flailing around until she was suspended by the strap.

She tried to break the strap by bouncing as best she could, flexing her legs and abdomen up and down. The strap held. Frustrated, she kicked at the tree and jerked around desperately, until finally able to unhook herself and she fell painfully, her captured arms providing the only padding from a particularly lumpy, exposed root structure.

After no little effort, Laurel was able to stand again. She wandered to a shaded patch of dried needles and dropped to her knees. A tear slipped down her cheek. The afternoon breeze cooled the skin along the tear’s path. Tears would be unavailable to her when she slipped into a Clairambulant state.

Some Wom trained themselves to endure the transition to Clairambulance with monthly fasts and degrees of isolation. Such rituals never appealed to Laurel and now she regretted it. She closed her eyes and decided to try to slip into a meditative state. If she could clear her mind, perhaps she could think up a miracle. Unfortunately, for a long time she was distracted by the sounds of the wind, insects buzzing by, rodents in the surrounding rocks, and the cry of predatory raptors. She was distracted by the pressure in her bladder. Her eyes occasionally popped open only to look into her lap at the extravagantly wound and inaccessible knot which held her leggings desperately in place.

Finally, as the sun shifted to the west and held frequent council behind a growing stream of cumulous clouds, Laurel pondered the events that led her to this lonely mountain slope… She thought back to the fateful day when Evvy was sentenced to the Hollow Well.