Lunar Antipodes: The Second Book of Regenesis by D. Scott Dickinson

Author:D. Scott Dickinson [Dickinson, D. Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-09-19T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18. Village of the Damned

Greld is angry.

The skinny, fretful child who waits upon her has disturbed her fitful sleep and, were it not for the message she brings, would receive another thrashing.

Not this time, Greld decides. It is the word her little spy brings that kindles her ire.

The other females of the tribe are gathering in the council ring.

Greld’s anger at this affront to tribal tradition contorts the misshapen features of her unlovely face. Smashed into horrid disfigurement by beatings from her mate. Her glowering eyes are mere specks sunken into a visage closely resembling the desiccated husk of a once-pulpy fruit. All ridges and folds that quiver when she speaks.

It has been many sleeps since Gruk disappeared with all the strong males of the tribe. It has been as many sleeps since Greld suffered the last savage beating at his hands. But while absence may make others’ hearts grow fonder, his long absence has not improved his mate’s disposition.

Hers is a baleful nature deeply rooted in the barbarous traditions and practices of her kind. It is their delight in depraved torment that distinguishes the females of the tribe from the males as definitively as their ability to bear young.

If Gruk and his fellow brutes are as beasts in the field, Greld and her sisters are as fiends from the pit. For theirs is a nature made more malevolent by the frequent beatings administered by their mates.

While the males lash out in unrestrained but indifferent fury, the females pour malice-aforethought and deliberate torment into every thought and act. And it is the females, not the males, who have honed the raw edge of their cruelty on the slaves they have abused for generations beyond remembrance.

Maidens in the arts of fiendish depravity, Greld and her sisters are true daughters of Hecate.

A malediction.

An affliction.

A racking scourge upon all living things that fall within their cruel grasp.

It was the great tragedy of the faultless survivors of their long-dead civilization that the spawn of the world’s great polluters fell upon them and placed them in eternal thrall to their brutal, fiendish descendants. As successive generations sank deeper and deeper into barbarism and depravity, they adopted ever more sadistic, abusive maltreatment of the slaves.

Chief among their basest practices is the slaughter and cannibalism of slave infants.

Those who display birth defects or who appear insufficiently robust are immediately put to the dagger and carved into portions. Their flesh feasted on by the ravenous members of the tribe. For these infants, the end is at least mercifully swift.

The greater suffering awaits those slave infants who survive.

The management of the slaves is left to the female members of the tribe. Each of whom strives to outdo her sisters in rapacity and cruelty. So thorough are they that they have depleted the number of slaves with each new generation.

Thus it is that slave-help is now the province of Greld alone. For she alone possesses the tribe’s last slave.

And thus it is that she has to face down a growingly resentful group of the tribe’s females.

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