OK, it wasn’t that bad.Windling cuntwas a walk in the park. Nothing compared to being denied food for days, having to work three or four hours extra every shift or return to my bunk at three in the morning to find my pillow filled with faeces.
“No, sir,” I replied, somehow content with this new information. I didn’t get a faerie because Milosh wanted to humiliate me. The disgust on his features told me he would happily trade my place with one of his boys, as he so clearly put it.
“Get the fuck out and go do your job.”
By the time I nodded in greeting and turned around, the general had time to reconsider my humiliation and send a mouthful of phlegm down my neck. Great, now I had to shower again.
But that part of me, the one that kept pushing, the one that loved to embrace the pain and humiliation, turned to the general.
“Thank you for your time, sir. I look forward to your hands touching me again. Next time to hang the major epaulettes on my shoulder,” I threw him a dashing smile.
“Get the fuck out, Harrow.”
“With pleasure, sir.”
I stepped out and shut the door, feeling a little bit more excited about the person I was going to spend the next month with.
I walked the hallways back to my assigned room, chasing away memories that always found their way back in the most unfortunate moments.
When I first arrived here, frozen and full of mud and terror. When I was first assigned as a guard and forced to standpost by the frozen lake all winter long. How my jacket and boots turned up either ripped to pieces or filled with rat intestines or half-chewed leftovers to attract the wild animals during the night.
Wolves did not scare me anymore, that was for sure. They were no match for twelve-year-old boys and the cruelty they inherited through the human blood they cherished beyond anything else. Not that my blood was not the same as theirs, but it was seen as polluted because I was born in a different place. In a faerie place.
I made a right turn and walked past the garden entrance and towards the bridge that leads to the new cabins, meant for the comfort of new recruits of distinguished families, commanders and higher ranks. I looked at number 17, the small cabin I had my eyes on ever since Commander Vancozia lived there. The first and only woman to do so.
Her cabin always smelled nice, she always had a fire burning and the stove running and whenever she did not have to fight the monster that haunted us, she spent her time working in her small garden or planting flowers in front of her cabin.
Everyone hated them but no one dared touch them. No one but me. I lived for their colours, for their beauty and snuck out every chance I got to spy on the woman. The cabin emptied after her passing, and no one wanted number 17. It looked in dire need of repairs, but that’s why I’d been working my ass off for so many years.
Everything I did not send to my family, every uniform allowance or bravery bonus went on a secret card, opened in a regular bank, so the military could not find it using my name. I was one month away from earning the right to request the keys to this cabin, to claim number 17 as my own. To be mine until my passing. If I were to judge by the dozens of attempts on my life these fuckers made, I was one lucky cookie and hoped to have that cabin for a long, long time.
“Hey E, I heard about your appointment trial,” Veronica came bursting in, forcing the door off its hinges because why wouldn’t she? After all, this was not her room, she did not care one bit about the damage she could cause around her.
She called me E, because Ellyana was somehow too much for her to say. Too much for everyone to pronounce. I knew they hated the origin of my name, I myself had despised it since it brought me so much sorrow. Everyone who spoke to me without shouting an order or needing to address me for an official matter had reduced me to an initial.
“Hey, Veronica,” I half-turned and replied, my hands still working to wrap all the T-shirts I had piled on my bed. Enough to last me a month.
“A faerie, huh?” she placed her ass on the mattress, uninvited as usual, and blinked at me with curious eyes, probably wondering why I was so calm and not bawling my eyes out crying with the news.
Because it didn’t come from fucking Milosh, that’s why. Someone above, someone with power in our realm thought of me instead of not one, but three of their own. Because I was finally on the right track, finally doing something right.
“Yeah, but at least I can get a cabin and better wages, so…” I shrugged, ignoring her, and placing my full attention back to my clothes. Were five pairs of jeans enough?
“I know but, a faerie?” she kept insisting, her curls dropping ostentatiously down her shoulder while her big eyes blinked at me with lazy curiosity.
I knew what she was trying to do, what she was trying to raise in me. But that monster was too well trained to come out with such an amateur calling.
Veronica and mine’s relationship was complicated. She was the only other woman in our unit, so we were left with no other choice but to train together and bond over period cramps, but where I was skinny, formless and despised, she was a dashing apparition that caused everyone to mellow. She never had to finish her chores or conduct all her exercises because one clink of her voice was enough to get her out of the things she did not fancy following through. But they needed to be finished, so guess who had to pick up her slack?
“It’s only a month and then I’ll be a major…” I shrugged again to let her know the conversation bored me. I also twisted a knife there, she may have managed to get out of many unpleasant things, but her adulthood only brought her the rank of First Lieutenant. Meaning she didn’t even have her own room and had to share with three privates, being the only female with her status.
And I would soon get a cabin.
Whatever this faerie was, I would break the hell out of it.
“Are you really going to check my panties, Michael?” I frowned at the security guard, once a colleague. I have known his family since I was a babe, I had more memories of them than the dreadful place we used to live in before escaping to the Human Realm. Michael was probably three or four when our parents jumped realms, along with a few hundred others, hoping for a better future.
He was given to the army, same as I was, as offering for the shelter provided to the refugees aka our parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters. The Human Realm was no fool. It claimed a young life for the betterment of older ones and kids like Michael and me had to become the tribute.
