Lament of the Slave

To me, other worlds were mythical places that existed only in books and in the minds of theoretical physicists. And of course, as a little girl, I dreamed of visiting such worlds. Who didn’t, right? I longed for my own adventure in such a world, for you to be the heroine of my own story - one who would stand up to every wrongdoing in the land and eradicate it. Nothing and no one would be able to stand in my way, and all the villains would tremble at the sight of me. 

Well, we won’t always get what we wished for, and now that I was all grown up, it wasn’t just the villains who trembled at the sight of me.

The other worlds. There were many ways to get to them, some pleasant, some not, some I would prefer, some I would rather not even think about.

I dreamed of a king or his daughter summoning me to save their kingdom from the demon king; of my ability I would use it to cut my way through demon armies to his castle. I thought of all sorts of mysterious ways I could get to another world, wild magic gone awry, mere chance, or maybe a once-in-a-millennium cosmic convergence that would open portals to other worlds. That would be nice, too, but that childhood dream didn’t come true either.

Frankly, I’d be okay with reincarnation, too. While living as a child would be challenging, I would manage; after all, I would have parents, friends, and a mostly normal life here. Reincarnation had one catch, though, and that was the need to die first. I never did. Twenty-eight was too young to die of old age, and I was too healthy to be struck down by a stroke. Not even an accident met my fate. No loose brick fell on my head, no truck with broken brakes smashed me to pieces.

I actually wished that had happened.

But no, I encountered something else, something far worse and more sinister.

Tired after an extremely long day at work - the sixteen-hour shift wasn’t standard, but everyone in the flower shop was needed on Valentine’s Day - I was returning home. Seeing myself in bed as a normal person would, I made a half-asleep stop at the supermarket to buy some food before continuing with my plan to get home as quickly as possible. I never made it there. 

Taking a shortcut through that back alley - not the typical urine-smelling, garbage-strewn one, but a clean and widely used shortcut during the day, unfortunately unlit at night - was the biggest mistake of my life.

I was fearless when I should have given in to my fear. I should have avoided it, not thinking I could handle anyone who dared to jump me. Big mistake. Sure, I took a few self-defense classes, but how to neutralize a twenty-centimeter-tall creature with wings hovering in front of you was not something they taught. And yes, that was what I encountered.

When I saw the creature, I was confused, thinking that my own brain was playing tricks on me out of exhaustion. Yet no matter what I did, massaging my temples, rubbing my eyes, the creature would not go away. The realization hit me, and with it, a thousand questions. What was the appropriate action to take in a situation like this? Stay still, run away, scream, or shake its hand? I never got a chance to find out.

The small flying creature reached out, not to shake my hand, which was in my purse in search of pepper spray, but to attack me. Before I knew it, I was engulfed in a blinding white light, ripped from my world, my friends, and my family. 

The next thing I remembered, after I came to, was standing in a dark cellar behind bars, through which a man with a broad grin looked at me, sizing me up, assessing me. It wasn’t the pleasant smile of someone with good intentions, someone who wanted to help me. Little did I know at the time that it was someone who was excited about his new experimental subject.

My instincts were screaming at me to defend myself, or better yet, to run. Neither of those were options I had, though. Locked in a damp cellar, with no window light and no idea where the hell I was, held still by the madman’s magic - of which I learned later - I never got a chance to show him the few moves I had learned in the self-defense classes. As soon as I showed up, he bound my body with magic, sealing my fate. 

I couldn’t move or even scream while he put an iron collar around my neck. All I could do was silently cry when he activated it, and just stare blankly as notifications popped up in my mind - no blue floating windows in front of my eyes, just information streaming into my mind. It was the first time I was introduced to the system operating in this world. That was also when I was forced to take my Class, and it wasn’t any I had ever dreamed of. I became a [Slave].

 

Name: Korra Grey

Race: Human

Gender: Female

Age: 28

Class: Slave [Master - Frederic Dungreen]

Level: 1

 

Seeing that in my mind was horrendous, but it spoke bluntly of reality. There was a Class system in this world. 

Later I learned that everyone born here, upon reaching adulthood, could choose one of several Classes offered to them based on their past actions - most often what they did for a living. And so, with a good part of my life behind me, I could, too, choose from a variety of Classes, but that lunatic forced me to choose [Slave]. 

He didn’t care that I was from another world, that I was well past adulthood, and that I was still Classless. In fact, I found out over time that he didn’t even know about my background. He simply paid Fae - that creature’s name popped into my mind when I looked at it - [Fae: lvl ????] - to bring him someone suitable for his perverted experiments. Of course, there were more conditions than that.

And so, in this cruel way, I discovered that this wasn’t a world full of singing birds flying across the sky with a rainbow crossing over the flowering meadows where unicorns played. I soon learned that this was a heartless world full of suffering and pain, where slavery was a real thing that took away your free will if your master so desired. The freedom that had been a part of me all my life, and I couldn’t even defend myself.

Losing it was cruel, so cruel, yet I found far crueler what that psychopath wanted to do with me. The man didn’t see me as a human being, nor as a slave. To him, I was just an experimental subject, one of the lab rats in his basement that had the potential to achieve his goals. He didn’t hide them, his goals. On the contrary, he often talked about them - gloated about his dreams and wanted us to understand how noble his vision was. Well, no matter how he saw it, neither I nor the others in the six cellar cells shared his opinion. And since he conducted his experiments in secret, I would say that most of the public did not share such a positive view of his vision, either.

Or so I mistakenly thought. Someone shared his goal, someone high enough to keep this maniac’s experiments a secret. Someone with great interest in the outcome of these inhuman experiments; in creating a new Class, new soldiers, in giving humans more power than they were born with; in tricking nature and cheating the system.

This lunatic tried to mix man and beast; to allow humans to fly like birds and be as strong as bears, with magical powers to rival those of dragons. 

His experiments didn’t involve stitching beast limbs onto humans or gruesome things like that, but what he was doing was not far from it. He created extracts from the monsters, the essence of what he wanted to put into people, what they were supposed to gain, which he then injected into the veins of his slaves. 

The first extract, essence if you will, that I received was the one that was supposed to enable me to fly. How? Through magic? I wished. This essence, like the previous ones, was not without serious side effects - mutations.

That madman didn’t use a scalpel, but I couldn’t tell the difference. What the essence did to me felt like he was cutting into my body and operating on me while I was fully conscious.

After days of agony, this mutation gave me wings and the General Skill [Flight]. The fool considered it a tremendous success and an incredible advancement in his research, even though I wasn’t the first to acquire this ability, nor the first to grow a pair of wings. However, I was the first to have a relatively small and symmetrical mutation. 

That is, both of my wings were the same size, and the mutation was mostly confined to them, with a few exceptions on my body. I didn’t grow a beak or talons like some.

So, yes, despite the fact that he jabbed me with that injection between my shoulder blades, and wings grew in the area of my hip, even though their span was only three meters and therefore incredibly small to allow me to fly, a successful experiment according to the madman. 

Well, one more thing, I didn’t die. Lucky me, huh? Not really. Anyway, most of the people here with me didn’t survive more than two essences. Only a few survived five. I lived through eight, but died five in the meantime.

During the fourth mutation, my heart stopped for almost thirty seconds. After the fifth, it was over a minute. It took five minutes for my heart to start beating after the sixth mutation, and I was practically dead for a quarter of an hour after the seventh. Sadly, I did not see the light at the end of the tunnel, I did not go to heaven, nor did I fall into hell - and I wished I had, no matter where I would ended up. There was nothing, though. I didn’t remember anything during my death, as if I had fallen into a deep sleep only to wake up in my nightmare, locked behind bars.

That was until the eighth injection.

I don’t know how long I was dead after I received it, but it was long enough for that madman to consider me dead. Long enough for him to remove the slave collar from my neck, take some notes, and dispose of my body as he had done with so many before me.

Since I was in his hands longer than anyone else, I’ve seen it many times. Dozens of people like me died in that cellar, and I must admit, I envied them so much. They had my respect for what they went through, something they didn’t get from that lunatic even after their deaths. 

The only consolation was that he didn’t dissect their bodies and just threw his failed experiments into the sewers. Well, he made US do it.

I had never seen a corpse before I appeared in this world. I attended several funerals, but all the dead were already in coffins. Here, at the behest of this maniac, I had to throw over a dozen bodies into the sewers. It broke me. That, and the thought that I would end up like this, that it would be my destiny, that one day a new pair of slaves who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of this bastard would throw me into the sewers. It was . . . too much.

Were it not for my passive skill [Indomitable Will], I would have gone mad a long time ago. Although I think “dr. Moreau” wouldn’t mind if someone went insane as he only needed his subjects to be healthy in body, not in mind. 

Well, my nightmares and pleas had to be heard at the same point because, as I said, the eighth injection was it. I died - or rather, I’d been dead long enough.

And so, after more than a year of torture, I got out.

 

***

 

Shivering and chattering my teeth, cold, I sat curled up on the riverbank, OUT in the downpour, somewhere in this vast world. Cold to the bone, my feathers wet, my fur as well as the mane on my head soaked, I wished this wasn’t a dream, a cruel trick of my mind to give me hope.

I wished . . . 

Honestly, I don’t know how long I sat there with my legs pressed to my chest, my tail wrapped around my body and hidden under my wings, but it was long enough for the rain to stop and the sun to peek out of the clouds.

As soon as its rays hit my body, I looked up, the warmth falling on my cheeks, the bright light cutting into my eyes accustomed to the gloom of the cellar. Yet I continued to look and grin like a fool. It had been too long since I had last seen the sun. In fact, I forgot how much I missed it, how beautiful it looked, how amazing it was when its rays warmed my body. 

Suddenly, Eleaden - the name of the world I had learned from other slaves - was more beautiful than ever. 

Eventually I stopped crying and stretched out on the wet grass, spreading my arms, legs and wings, enjoying the wonderful feeling of just lying there in the warm embrace of the sun’s rays, accompanied by the sounds of running water and the rustling of the leaves on the trees. It was incredibly peaceful and quiet here, in complete contrast to the cellar. There it was, just terror, fear, pain, weeping and screaming every fucking day.

Nevertheless, as much as I enjoyed it, everything had to end. I couldn’t lie on the riverbank all day. So as soon as I was dry, I jumped to my feet and started walking along the river, following its flow, my only goal being to get as far away from the Cellar of Terror as possible. I knew I was in the kingdom of Arda, the river to my right was called Traim, and if I followed it, I should come across the border of the Sahala Empire.

It was a mystery to me why that lunatic was throwing his victims into a river that flowed into the territory of another nation. Not that I ever said it to his face; in fact, I never asked a single question about it, secretly hoping that one of those bodies would reach the Sahal Empire and they would come to our rescue. That never happened, and I became one of those corpses. It was now my duty to stop the fool’s rampage and save those people from further experiments.

From the little information I had gathered from the slaves and my now former master, I knew that the Sahal was not a land of saints where everyone was equal and slavery was outlawed. It was a human empire, but tolerant of other races. As elsewhere, there were the rich, and those who lived in poverty. Slavery, though present, had its order, and slaves were treated like humans.

It was not an idyllic country by any means, but beggars could not be choosers.

For hours I walked along the river, its slow current and my skill soothing my mind. For the first time in months of captivity, I was able to determine how time passed, except for the system clock in my mind. I watched the sun set slowly toward the horizon and the shadows of the trees lengthen across the landscape. It was beautiful.

My walk stopped at the bridge over the river. That man-made structure meant one thing: an increased chance of running into someone. The question was whether to risk such an encounter or avoid it. A much easier decision to make if I knew in which country I was. Was I still in Arda? Or had I already crossed the borders? I could be miles away from them or already in the lands of the Empire. Without GPS on my phone and nothing like a system map in my head, it was simply hard to tell where the fuck I was.

Thus, my fear of lingering at the bridge. If I stay there and wait for someone to show up, I’ll be risking a lot. It could be an Ardian who would immediately report me - an escaped [Slave] as Class was something everyone could see - to the nearest soldiers or Sahalan with whom I would have a chance to negotiate with.

Eventually, I decided to hide and wait for someone to come and tell me where I was, where the road led, and what cities were at its ends, sure that I could outrun them if I had to.

My [Faint Presence] skill helped me with the hiding. If I didn’t want to, and if someone didn’t focus their attention on me, my presence would go unnoticed. Some slave owners simply didn’t want their property to be too noticeable and interfere with their daily lives.

As it turned out, the road wasn’t very busy, and I sat there for quite a while, hiding under the bridge. So long, in fact, that the sun was low on the horizon by the time my patience paid off.

A wagon pulled by two horses appeared on the road on the left side of the riverbank. To be honest, I was a little relieved to see the horses, something familiar and not some otherworldly beast whose blood was now coursing through my veins. That aside, despite the distance and the gloom of the approaching sunset, what caught my eye besides the horses was an old man sitting on a wagon bench. He was wrapped in a cloak with a hood pulled down over his skull. But not deep enough to prevent me from seeing his bearded face. He looked tired, worried, and on guard.

My whole body tensed, my stomach clenched, my heart was racing, my throat was dry, and if it were not for [Indomitable Will], I would have run away a long time ago.

[Merchant: lvl 78]

The man was a trader, and apparently a good one. You see, the people of Eleaden gained levels in their chosen Classes, and those levels marked how successful they were. Most of them managed to reach a class level of about 50, while a man of level 75 was considered an expert in their craft when it came to the professions. One hundred and more, and you were regarded as a master in your field. As for adventurers and soldiers, level 100 was just the starting point for their trades.

I was [Slave: lvl 92].