07.15.2127 - Auvryndyr Trial
The guard shoved her so hard into the cell that Shannon hit the granite floor and skinned both knees. The loud crash of the cell gate closing behind her was almost deafening as it reverberated in the Church dungeon corridors. She lay on her stomach and sobbed, the cold floor sending a chill through her blouse, but she no longer cared about what happened to her.
She had failed her parents and now all was lost.
Time passed and she had cried until she had become exhausted with the effort. Pulling her arms under her face she fell into a fitful sleep that replayed the mornings event over and over in her mind.
…her father amongst dozens of soldiers in the infirmary, dieing from wounds from the Kah’Tharta…
…her mothers glowing hands healing her fathers open chest wound…
…the look of utter horror and shock of the surrounding priests…
…her father looking down upon her and asking for forgiveness…
…her father slamming the bowl into the Priests head…
…another priest taking a boot to the chest with a sickening thud…
…the savagery of his father as he repeatedly pummeled the same man for not letting go of her mother…
…the arrival of the six guards, two grabbing her Mom and slamming her against a wall while three others surrounded her father and the last came for her…
And then the dreamscape changed the reality of the event and turned it into a true nightmare as the sixth guard held the dagger to her throat. From behind Shannon, the guard shouted over to her two parents as he grappled her tightly.
“Dakin, you and your Witch will have no child!” the guard yelled. The dagger suddenly pierced through the bottom of her chin and pinned the tongue to the roof of her mouth even as the cold steel cut behind her nose and eyes, it’s the tip painfully stabbed her mind…
Shannon awoke with a start. Laying on the cold granite floor in the very dark cell, she at first didn’t realize where she was, when she did, she wept again. She pulled herself up and crawled to the end of the cell. Her head hurt with a thumping ache that made her want to vomit. Sitting up against the wall that shared an unclean looking lavatory, she looked around for the first time. On the wall to her left were too sleeping platforms, mounted one on top of the other by chains. It was then that she noticed that the top bunk wasn’t empty, as she could see an elbow teetering over this side of it, presumably with a man-sized figure laying on its back with his hands behind his head.
She stopped crying with another start, suddenly realizing that she wasn’t alone, and worse yet, was in a prison cell with some unknown man.
Her heart sank at the sudden sound of his deep-baritone voice.
“Now what would you have done that was so bad that they would put you, a female child, in a prison cell with a grown man?”