Reflections

It was painful to see her as lost as she was. Lost to herself. I could only blame the years she had spent with dwellers. Confined beneath the ceilings and within the high walls. I can only wonder that there is any of her left at all. How deep the webbing of the lies she believed and spun around herself for protection. I can only think it is being back here on the plains with her people, under the Sky, no hiding from the wind and the rain that has begun to make her honest with herself. But that honesty is painful in its beginnings.

I reined in the beast and I threw a leg over the saddle and dropped to the ground. I gave her a full ten beats of the drum to kneel and when she did not I kicked her legs out from under her. No more was she given a hort. I told her she was not worth owning until she was honest with who she was. I told her she could not be owned nor mated, free woman nor slave until she knew who she was in the core of her being. I told her she was worthless without that knowledge, that she was a danger to herself and those around her.

I asked her who she was. She replied she was a slave. I told her I didn't ask what she was I asked who she was. She replied she was just a woman.

Just a woman.

Just a woman?

I wanted to backhand her. I wanted to see the blood spray from her lips across my boots. Instead I had a painful clamp of my fingers on her jaw and I spoke, though I probably spoke through my teeth.

"Just a woman? Where is your pride Tuchuk? Where is your arrogance? Where is the trust and faith in your breeding? Are you not a woman of the plains? Do you not feel the bosk in your veins? the Sky? the soil? the grass? Do you not remember the feel of kaiila muscle between your thighs? and the fury of a plains storm?"

Ah the poison of the dwellers. That she would have to give up everything to be a slave? Bosk shit. It would not change who she was, it would enhance what she was in her core. No more hiding. No more lies. She was pure Tuchuk woman. Free to feel desire when a strong man took her by the hair. Free to kneel at the feet of men and receive the gift of mastery. That thing we do to women, we show them pieces of themselves. Each man would show her a different piece. Some she would come to love more than others, some would show a clearer picture to her ... but she was not burdened with the choice any longer. She was free to kneel and receive. Her fear was based on the lie that she would be less of a woman in a collar.

When the truth was that it was the only way she would be a whole woman.