A Thrall Perfected Ch. 01

That information clarified nothing. "But...wait, I saw them use magic to get here. And last night I saw Devin do things...that no normal person could do."

Bryana was proud of herself for them and them for their ability to embrace and excel with their gifts. "Their bodies are as I have made them. In many ways, they are the body perfected. And, yes, they have the use of magics that I allow them to have the use of."

With a gesture from her, Devin shifted position so that Mara could look upon the bracelet that fit firmly against the flesh of her wrist. The carving was intricate and looked layered somehow, as though there were etchings under etchings under etchings in ways that she had never seen a metalsmith accomplish. "What you saw are merely extensions of my own power."

A well of excitement burst forth. It was what she hoped and, somehow more. "Can you teach me to be like them? Can you teach me to do what they do?"

Bryana laughed. It was a soft sound and conveyed amusement and tolerance. "No, my dear. Even if I were inclined, there is nothing to 'teach.' I selected them and changed them as it suited me."

She looked at both of them and could easily see why they were selected, though she asked anyway. "What made you pick them?"

"They each came to me from my own paths and they needed to be mine."

Her tone was a plaintive one, "Here I am, from my own path and everything."

Bryana looked ahead. "It's not the same, young lady." After a pause, "Since there's nothing more to discuss, we'll get you and your horse home."

Her cheeks burned. "She not mine."

Bryana looked at her, giving her a raised brow and a hint of a smile. "Well, then, we'll get you home so you can get the horse back to its owner and see if you can convince him or her not to have you arrested for thievery."

"Please." The former pained her far more than the latter and she blurted out her next words before rationality could keep them in her brain. "If you don't help me I'll turn you in."

She didn't expect Bryana to laugh and found herself wallowing in a mix of anger, surprise and embarrassment when she did. "Turn me in for what?"

Honestly, she wasn't completely sure so she latched on to the two most obvious things in her mine. "Being a mage; doing things to them."

"Prove I am a mage, Mara. This world is rife with paranoia, but it is still not so insane that you can randomly point to a healer, scream 'mage,' then watch them be put down. As to my two, do you honestly think they will corroborate your cries? Do you think they will confess to all the ways they were changed at my hand?"

She sounded as though she was more amused than anything. "The answer to that is as obvious is as it is meaningless. There will be nothing for you to tell them because you will remember none of this to begin with." Bryana turned from a step ahead of her, to see that the woman stopped, frozen, looking as though she was facing death itself.

Bryana's tone was gentle and she put a hand on her shoulder to attempt to comfort. "There will be no pain at all and no lasting effects. This simply will not have happened as far as you're concerned."

She took a step back, directly into the immovable wall of flesh behind her. "Don't. Please. Don't send me back there."

Bryana paused, knowing what she knew of the place and the events of the night before. "Do they harm you there?"

Mara shook her head, "No, no one does anything to me there. Not there. Don't...send me back there. Don't send me back to that nothing place and that nothing life. I go to sleep, wake up, fill a few hours before I have to go to that bar and spend the night serving watered down ale to pigs before I have to clean their vomit and their seed up off the floor only to do it again tomorrow."

"When those two came in," she began, the sense of wonder creeping back into her voice and the feeling made her skin tingle as though she were being carried up with the crescendo of her favorite musical piece, "and did what they did, it was like blinking and then suddenly seeing that there were heroes from story books actually alive in the world. There are people that can help. There are people that can be decent. There are people that don't live in fear of the world and try to make it better."

Bryana, with some effort, didn't laugh again, mainly because she saw the sincerity of belief and the well of hope in her eyes. Some humor escaped, but it was more the self-deprecating variety. "All that they do is on me, and I am no hero. Sometimes I do as I'm contracted as a mage. Sometimes I simply try to do what's right more often than not and, sometimes, that means I do very bad things. It is for the greater good as I see it, and I hope that it works out that way in the end, but, rest assured girl, that I am not some paragon of virtue."

"If you want accolades and the pride of standing for what is true and right, join General Jaye's army." Her voice was pure tenderness for a moment. "She's the hero. She is every bit the hero I'm not." Then a smile, "Work to be her, young lady."

"It took courage for you to follow. It took courage for you to step into something unknown just to see what was there. That deserves some note. While I will still take this from you because it's better for you that I do, I will leave you with some coin; enough to start someplace new if that's your wish. You can try to be someone new."

Everything was escaping her. Chance. Hope. Everything. It was slipping through her fingers and she had no idea how to make it stop so she stood her ground. "That's it? Just some money and I never remember this? That won't solve anything. No matter how much money you give me or where I go it won't change anything because I'm the problem, all right?"

"I'm the problem." Saying it was a bittersweet relief. It was a source of shame to be sure, but there was a freedom in admitting it and that freedom was exhilarating, and it drove her forward. "I watched my parents work hard for little and, you know what? They were almost happy for that. They were happy to be where they were because why take an opportunity and have it fall apart, then lose what little there was? I suppose I understand when you have children you have to take care of."

"But they're still happy to be nothing." She laughed mirthlessly. "And my siblings? They wallow in their little shit jobs with just enough to get by. You hear them talk and they want for nothing, but you dig deeper and that contentment is just fear of being worse off tomorrow than today."

"I'm my parents' child, too. I learned all the lessons that I was taught, except for one: how to be content with nothing. I hate that place. I hate Roanes and the drunken pigs. I hate the stench of cheap alcohol and the pigs who drink so much of it they end up vomiting and shitting all themselves and the floor for me and the others to clean up. I hate watching the women that fuck those 'men' die a little each night."

Her voice broke and her eyes took on a bit of extra sparkle with the tears that fought their way forward. "The light in their eyes dims just a little bit with each dawn. I know because I see it every day in my own."

"But I can't leave. That shit job in that shit place gives me enough to lived there's always that voice that cannot be ignored that wonders what will happen if I lose it. Money to start elsewhere? And do what, Bryana? I have no skills. I can read pretty well and do some math, and that's about it. Add that to the fact that, while I'm not a monster, even I know I have no beauty to trade on. That means I'd pinch those coins until they begged for mercy, but, in the end, I would just end up in a nothing job with no future. Then I grow old and die, and I was nothing."

"Last night, I saw women that were so much more. Not only were they something, they were something beyond everything else. I want to be that.

"Regardless of the price? You have no idea what you're wishing for, girl."

"I'll work for you, as long as you want. I'll do what you say."

There was that laugh again that Mara was beginning to dislike because, again, it seemed to be coming at her expense. "That simple is it, Mara? I change your body and give you power and then I just trust that you will not abuse it. Or that you will not turn it against me?"

Mara answered quickly, "I wouldn't, I swear."

Bryana stepped to her so they were to to toe, with Mara a good head shorter than she and then some. "Let's say your word is good, Mara, though when hypothetical exercises become reality a person's word tends to be forgotten in favor of that power. You would do as I say, would you?"

"I swear."

"Would you kill someone?" Her head tilted to the right and she watched the hesitation at play in the other's features. "It's not something that I often set them to directly, but it has happened and it will again. If I pointed to a person and told you that they had to die, could you simply, instantly kill them without remorse or shame?"

"Let me demonstrate." She gave a quick glance upward, "Your metal to her throat, please."

With the same ferocity, speed, and power that Mara witnessed from Devin last night, she felt a hand claw around her throat before her world spun in what looked and felt like every direction at once before the ground slammed into her back, pushing the air from her lungs in a rush that made her cough to try to pull more in, and it came, but not easily. She felt the small piece of metal in her hand dig into the soft skin of her neck, pressing firmly enough that she could feel her heartbeat against it.

And when Mara looked up, she saw indifference in those brown eyes. There was no love, hate, or insanity. She was told to do something and she did it. She did it and simply awaited the next order, and, if it didn't come, Mara somehow knew that Imir would be content to keep her there just that way forever just because that's what Imir was told to do. To Mara, that was part of their power, too.

"Do you understand now, girl? Do you see in her that if I tell her that you are to die, you will and she will simply walk away from your body without a second thought and she will do it because I decided that you were to die. She doesn't care. If I asked her to express a view, she may ask if I am making the best choice, but even that is to defend me in it's own way."

"They have the power I give them, and the will I want them to have because statues that all but have to be told to breathe are not things I have the time or desire to manage. But, if I tell Imir to kill you, here is where you die. Because I decided what was right and what had to happen for her."

Bryana let the words hang in the air in, what was for Mara, an ominous moment. "Release her."

Just like that, the pressure left her throat and her hips as Imir lifted smoothly from her and replaced the bit of metal within the pouch at her hip. Bryana offered her hand and it hovered in the air before Mara took it firmly and righted herself.

Bryana looked at the ebbing fear and continuing fierceness in Mara's eyes seemed to have come to a decision and was relieved to have done so. She once told Neral, one of her mates, that there were people who wanted to be controlled. There was a peace and liberation that came with giving your concerns, and even your ability to be concerned to another. Deres, their other, was fond of giving choices wherever he could. Combined, those ideas would serve well enough. And, truthfully, there was sympathy for Mara and her life. It took courage for her to make it this far, maybe more than she'd ever displayed in her life. She decided that earned the girl a choice of her own.

"They will never betray me because they can't, Mara. Much of their will is gone and replaced with mine. They will never be free to be what they were again. Even the desire to be that is gone because it doesn't serve me."

"I care for them and want the best for them, but what the best for them is will always be mine to determine. You want to be something else? You want to be what you think is 'more' and 'better?' Well, I'm telling you here and now that the cost for that is nothing less than who you are, and who you will be for every day of your life. You will kill if I say to do it because I say with as much concern behind your own eyes as Imir's a moment ago. You will love as I say because I say. Every part of your body, mind, and heart will be mine to shape. Forever."

She offered her hand. "Tell me you wish to go home and this will be taken from you. You will awaken at home with some coin, and even without the fear and dread that keeps you where you are. You can go on and have a life that is for you to determine, and, even if you do not remember that I did, I will wish you well."

"If you take my hand, you do so knowing that I will kill you, Mara. I will kill all the parts of you that do not benefit me for you to keep. I will kill those parts of your mind and I will reshape your body to my whim. So, go home, Mara," Bryana said, Mara believing she could hear extra emphasis in that, "or make the last choice you will ever fully make on your own and give me your life."

Mara looked into Bryana's eyes and they were unreadable, refusing to influence that final choice either way. But they did, in a way, by not doing so at all. There was power behind those eyes. There was certainty. There was an absence of the fear that Mara had known since she was old enough to know how little they had and how hard her family worked to keep it. What was there were already things that Mara had never known at all, or only known for a fleeting moments before her family's inherited ability to 'what if' themselves into paralysis set in.

She could just go home. She knew she probably should just go home. Bryana would change her enough; she promised as much. Mara would have a little money and the will to take a chance with it. She'd be better off in that alone in ways she hadn't dreamed possible before last night. Perhaps that's all she truly needed.

Her eyes found Imir and Devin again, the two standing tall and proud. They were examples of what awaited her: strong, determined beings gifted with whatever Bryana chose for them to have. They looked like they could do anything and be anything, and all they needed was her permission to do it. Bryana could warn her away, and she would probably not be nearly as awed as Mara was at seeing what the barmaid had because that's just what she made them to do, but the promise of it spoke to something deeper within Mara that she couldn't truly articulate in the moment.

If she went home with a little money and a little courage, she would never be them. She could never be them. She would go back to living a less fearful, but just as uneventful a life. A husband. Children. A home. Cooking. Cleaning. Growing old. It was still, for Mara, a meaningless, rote life that her parents had and siblings had, and most of the world had, but one that was almost as unbearable to her as what she'd come from. Living through the sameness of it all and contemplating decades more of the same was strangling her spirit just as surely as letting those drunken pigs bounce on her day after day, year after year, would have destroyed Salli's. It would always be the same, even if she had the money and the artificial courage to change the fringes.

To be them may not mean being a hero, but she saw Bryana send those women in to rescue a young woman from a life of bondage that would have drained that life of anything worthwhile. Salli would never forget what was given to her that night by all the women with her in the woods this day. Those women with her in these woods may never be heroes or win accolades, but they made a difference. If she could make difference like that, even sometimes, what would truly be lost if someone else chose for her what it would be and how it would be done?

If she could be them and make a difference in ways that Mara never could and have a life that Mara could never have, what difference would it truly make to the world if she were dead? She met the blue eyes before her, straightened her spine, and took Bryana's hand, adding two simple words:

"I choose."

Her body jerked as a current coursed through her, and then her world went black.

To Be Continued...