…
It was a morning like every other day for the last eight years and Athea woke up reluctantly as always.
She parted the drapes of her little alcove and walked through the kitchen and back-door to the outhouse. She was planning breakfast for her patrons, a simple fisherman's family in a small dump of a village called Hithad, on the east cost of Vernya.
Her father had died on a raid in an unknown country before she was born. He hadn't even known her mother was pregnant with her.
Athea couldn't remember much of the time she was living in the far north of Calmyra, in a country named Kurgath, the homeland of the Norgar. It was eight years ago, she was six and her mother had decided to leave her home and live with a friend.
Her friend had married a wealthy merchant and was living with him at his home on the isles of Cordan. She and her mother Darea were on a sea passage to Cordan when their ship sank in a heavy storm on a reef and Athea's world turned into shit.
They had left her homeland on the night of her sixth birthday and she remembered her mother talking to her brother.
Athea was holding her mother's hand, tired, scared and devastated to be leaving her home and her brother. She looked at him crying, pleading with him to make them stay, or to come with them. He did neither. Only eleven years old, he was just a little boy himself. So she lost him. At least he was still alive, she hoped.
They left to live with people she didn't know, in a land far away, for reasons she didn't understand. The sad part was that they never made it that far. A storm; a light in the darkness; a crashing sound; panic; screams; the sad, dying eyes of her mother, were all that Athea remembered of that night eight years ago.
As bleak as her future looked that night to her, what happened in reality was worse. Most of the passengers and seaman died with the sinking ship but Athea and a few others made it to the nearby shore.
The village fishermen rescued them.
Although they only "rescued" the women and girls.
The few surviving sailors they murdered as they made it to shore.
In the following years, Athea noticed that during a storm at night, the villagers used the light of burning wood stakes to lure struggling ships on to the reef surrounding the shore.
The man who "rescued" Athea made her the maid of his family. Athea learned quickly, always helped along by the stick of the fisherman's wife Thessaya. Some survivors became maids like her. If they were a little older, they were sold as slaves to traveling merchants.
She would probably be sold too, once the fisherman and his son became bored of her. That's what happened to two other girls, a few years older than Athea. For now it seemed she was too young for their taste, but probably not much longer. She recently noticed their looks lingering on her more often.
The fisherman Ramos was an old pig and looked like one and his son Thoras was just younger.
Thessaya his wife was a mean bitch and seemed to enjoy beating Athea, much more than she enjoyed being beaten by Ramos; a less frequent, but also regular happening, especially used as foreplay for their mating.
Athea learned a lot about such things. They all lived in a hut without separate rooms or dividing walls and only a drape divided their sleeping alcoves from the main room.
Many a night she lay awake, unable to sleep, disturbed and frightened by the sound of screams and beatings, followed later by the sound of flesh slapping flesh and grunts of the families pigs.
They also had a daughter, Denyssa, two years older than Athea. They had become friends the first year after Athea's arrival, but lately she acted more and more hostile towards Athea.
She never beat her like her mother did, but she often taunted and insulted Athea. It was Denyssa who joyously and rudely enlightened Athea about the things her father and brother were planning on doing to her soon.
"They will f*ck each of your skanky holes bloody, until you can't walk or even move for a week. Mother will be happy for the relief, and we both will be watching and cheering every time it happens!"
No, Athea didn't live a happy life, barely fourteen but already hardened by a cruel fate.
She worked hard and was beaten often, had no friends, and because of her looks, she stood out like a sore thumb among the villagers.
The average people of Vernya were fairly short, with dark hair and dark tanned skin, but Athea was pale, and stayed pale. Days of labor in the summer sun didn't change anything about it. She had almost white, long straight hair and pale blue eyes. She wasn't dumb and she was pretty. Although, looking ugly wouldn't have been bad, if it would have changed her prospects of becoming the scratching post for the male family pigs. If it had to be pretty than Athea would have preferred to look like a pretty Vernya girl, such as Denyssa, but she didn't. Slim and toned, Athea's build was less voluptuous and at only close to five feet she was also shorter than Denyssa.
To her chagrin Athea wasn't even that close to five feet. Over the last year at least her breast-size had increased to a respectable handful, but was still nowhere near to the bulging abundance Denyssa was parading around.
Her hips and butt were also more boyish, compared to the curvaceous figure of her benchmark with her big, round ass.
Some nights she still dreamed of her old homeland and her brother, but those were dreams of a lost life and they became rare over the years.
Now even her dreams reflected her hapless life of hard work and pitiless beatings. Lately she also had a new kind of nightmares, rape, which was her future. Athea was not so much frightened as utterly hopeless.