AUTHOR NOTE: Hello, readers! This idea came from a dream, so it's a little bizarre. Sorry if this backstory chapter is boring and slightly disturbing. The story gets better later. They'll be freedom and sexy lesbian nymphs for all. My endings are always happy.
--------
The north wind blew a chilling gust, laced with the remnants of winter. Sarielle hugged her posies to her chest as she walked down the tiny main street, one hand holding her knee-length skirt down. The flowers were proof that spring had arrived, but winter was still trying to claw her way from the grave. The sun was warm on her grey skin and made the blue in her near-black hair shine.
The butcher saw Sarielle pass but didn't acknowledge her. Some of the townsfolk were like that towards her. That was the problem with small villages. Everyone knew who she was. And what she'd done.
The town of Selrilve was the southernmost in the Bodineshka region, the furthest from Ametissa City. Nestled at the end of a road, it sat in a flat clearing, surrounded by light woodland. It struck all who came there as a silly placement for a town, as it was some distance from anything at all, and appeared frankly, to be stuck in the middle of nowhere. That you had to climb a dangerous winding track over a range to even get there meant they didn't get many visitors. The town came to be around seventy years prior. After the previous lord died, some folk noticed no one had claimed his cottage, or the area of land around it. Several young vagrant families set up camp, expecting to be evicted when the new owners arrived. But no one ever came and as they cleared the surrounding woods, they etched out a life for themselves and officially settled the town. Among them were Sarielle's great grandparents. Like the rest of the villagers, she was an elhuven, creatures that had started as elven-human halflings, but had since become a race in their own right.
The placement of the town also did some weird things to the demographics of the place. With no opportunities, many young people had left and for some reason there were a lot more men than women. Childbirth took more than it should have. Sarielle's mother had passed that way trying to bring her little sister into the world. It had been some time since the town had a proper doctor who could help with anything life threatening and they were too far from the next village to get there in time when things went wrong.
Of course, the men wanted to protect their daughters. But there was a line between protection and control. With a lack of women in the town, the distinction had become blurred and it seemed all the time the elders were becoming more possessive of the girls. Maybe that had something to do with Yvette, the girl who'd wandered into the forest and never made it out.
Sarielle was twelve when the young woman vanished. She couldn't really remember much about it, only that it shook the community. Had she strayed too far into the forest and become lost? Or even purposefully run away? Rumours circulated that she'd been sneaking out to see a boy.
What frightened people the most was that this had happened before. A long time ago a woman from the village disappeared. Her body was found only a day later, but the strange part was she appeared pregnant.
People suspected something worse than a wildcat had taken Yvette. Maybe some creature had wandered from the far darklands and snatched her? Could it be the same thing that took the first woman and what horrific trials was she enduring at its hands?
There wasn't much time to ponder the possibilities. The search party found Yvette the next day. But it was too late. They brought her body back in a sheet and buried her in the cemetery. The adults warned all the children to stay away from the forest, especially the girls.
Sarielle crouched beside her mother's grave and swept the leaves from the headstone. She'd picked wild flowers from the meadow to place there, as well as one for her brother and a smaller bundle for her poor sister who never got to take a breath. Sarielle had only been four at the time they died. All she remembered of her mother was a vague sense of warmth.
She had a forth bunch of flowers, which she took with her into the centre of the village. These she left as an offering at the huge altar in the garden they used as a church of sorts. The small community was rather pious and although they didn't follow any one god, they gave thanks to the deities that provided for them and prayed for a good harvest.
Sarielle bit her lip when she set the flowers down. Her undergarment had caught on the chastity belt hugging her nether lips and she chided herself for the dirty thought that followed.
"Ah, Sae, and at the altar too! Girl, you're going wherever whores go when you die."
Someone at some stage must have really hated whores, because "Don't be a whore" was a topic that came up regularly. They quite liked the idea of chastity and were against sex until you reached twenty. But even then you shouldn't be a slut. This meant some people got married at twenty, but most just moved away to somewhere less...restricting. Really, it seemed like some extreme precaution against being the ones whose daughter got pregnant at sixteen. Sarielle didn't know what happened if you did get pregnant at that age, but she was eighteen now, so she'd missed the opportunity to find out.
"It's not too late to shame your family," she joked to herself.
It was common hearsay in the town that girls in Selrilve were inherently slutty. Perhaps that was why they schooled them to stay away from such things. She thought it was nonsense when she was younger and it mostly was. Apart from when it wasn't.
The problem with imposing restrictions upon horny teenagers is that you're dealing with horny teenagers. Occasionally, things are going to go awry. No matter how much you threaten divine smiting, there are folk who are just not going to be able to resist temptation. About a year after Yvette disappeared a nineteen-year-old couple got caught in the act. They'd been encouraged to marry to lessen the embarrassment. It turned out they were happy to do so, but Sarielle couldn't help but wonder if a younger couple would also be expected to marry. What if they refused?
A few summers after that, Aster, a girl a year older than Sarielle, was caught post-coital with one of the boys. Cue more talk about harlots.
Sarielle was also seventeen when she fucked up and got caught. She'd been out in the meadows with Evadne, picking fruit in the old orchard. It started as a curious kiss, then suddenly she wanted all of her with a hunger she couldn't describe. Sarielle's father and his friend were the ones who'd found them and she discovered marriage wasn't on offer. They'd been lectured about their sins and how it was unnatural to touch another girl. Locked in the Den of Absolution, they were made to pray for forgiveness to the point of exhaustion and were given no food or water for two days. Evadne didn't take it very well. Or rather, she took it too well. Once they got out she wanted nothing to do with Sarielle or sex, and took up preaching and condemning as her new hobbies. It would probably take a decade before she thawed out enough to do anything close to sexual.
It went downhill from there. Sarielle could remember a time when she'd walked out of the town, across her favourite meadow to the old orchard. The trees were so ancient they barely bore fruit and no one knew who originally planted it, so they were allowed keep anything worth picking. Hevani and Kerensa were already there, but they had a tag-along. Torian was leaning against a tree, cutting an apple with a knife.
"What's he doing here?" Sarielle had asked.
"He's escorting us," Hevani replied from up a tree.
"He's what?"
The tall, dark-haired girl dropped to the ground, her arms full of fruit. "My father wouldn't let me go unless I took a boy for protection. And he would not be happy if he knew you were here."
Before Sarielle could protest, Kerensa jumped in. "The owner of the trading company heard a maiden being violated in the woods when he was searching for mushrooms yesterday."
"Well why didn't he stop to help her?" Sarielle took her basket to the next tree.
