The Hourglass of Friendship Cracks (3)
The next day, and the day after that, and all the days that followed, Arun continued to rape me.
Rape… could it even be called that anymore? My will and self-respect had already plummeted to rock bottom. I offered no resistance at all, simply letting him use my body however he pleased.
During the daylight hours he would leave me alone in the house while he went to his precious workshop, which at least gave me time to rest. Perhaps conscious that I was a mage, he never removed the gag, so I remained starved, unable to eat anything. But I could drink water. Arun would pour it over my face morning and evening. He still refused to take out the gag. Desperate not to die of dehydration, I would choke and splutter, frantically trying to swallow the water that ran into my nostrils.
All I managed to get down my throat was a little water, but unfortunately there were still remnants of something I had eaten before in my intestines. On the afternoon of the second day tied to the bed, I could hold it no longer and defecated where I lay.
The stench of urine and feces that filled the room all day, sharp enough to make my head spin, was nothing compared to the despair of having fallen so low I was no different from an animal. Far worse was the terror of not knowing what Arun would do to me for soiling the only bed we had. I suffered with that fear from morning till night.
Contrary to what I had imagined, when Arun returned from work he did not beat me. He simply stared at me for a long time, at the filth-covered wreck I had become. Then he fetched water, silently washed the soiled sheet, and cleaned my lower body and back without a word.
I turned my face away, burning crimson with shame, yet every time his wet hands touched between my legs I responded with pathetic, helpless arousal.
Perhaps he was simply cleaning me because he did not want to use a dirty hole. After washing me with such care, Arun released his lust inside my body just as he did every other day. Whimpering with embarrassment, I offered no resistance and simply surrendered myself to his touch.
He had threatened to turn me in for the bounty after playing with me for a few days, yet Arun kept me alive far longer than I expected. He did not subject me to severe abuse. Only when he grew excited during sex would he choke me until I nearly lost consciousness. It was not deliberate torment; he simply enjoyed the way my cunt tightened in terrified spasms.
Whether it was lingering affection, pity for a woman who would soon die anyway, the fact that my small body felt so good he never grew tired of it, or because I was the first object of carnal desire for a young man who had never held a woman before…
Or perhaps it was the intoxicating pleasure of having the childhood friend he once loved helplessly in his grasp, completely at his mercy.
In the meantime, I too began to change.
The revulsion and fear gradually melted away. Before I knew it, I was spending the daylight hours waiting desperately for Arun to return. And when he finally did, I would writhe and give him the most pitiful, pleading look I could manage.
Please, please… violate me. Use that big, hard cock to churn my insides into a complete mess. Give me the sensation of electric bliss racing from my helplessly spread toes all the way to the top of my head as I drool and thrash about. Give me the ecstasy of being whipped by flames of rapture.
When Arun saw me like that, he would swallow hard, pull down his pants, and press his manhood against me. Before he even began to move, before he had even fully entered me, I would buck my hips like a woman possessed. Like a whore who had done nothing but this for ten years.
The moment his cock pushed into my tightening walls, I lost myself completely. When I came back to my senses, Arun would already be asleep on the floor, and I would be lying in a puddle of my own slowly drying, rotting juices, wearing a broken smile.
I had come to crave being violated more than he did. Because of that, it could no longer even be called rape. It was simply rough sex between two consenting parties, one of whom happened to be tied up.
In that manner, nearly ten days passed. With no windows in the small room, my sense of time had grown hazy, so I could not be sure exactly how long it had been. Still, it had not been long enough for me to starve to death.
One day I noticed that the leather straps binding my wrists and ankles had grown slightly loose. They had not come undone on their own, nor had Arun loosened them. My body had simply grown that much thinner from not eating.
I moved my freed hands and feet a little. It was not enough to escape with, but it was something.
I coughed dryly around the gag. For the past several days I had been coughing as if I had caught a cold, and my chest felt tight. It was only natural after spending so long naked and starving. My immune system had to be at rock bottom.
That evening when Arun returned from work, his mood was different from usual. Instead of immediately taking off his pants and using me as had become routine, he simply stared down at me. One hand covered his mouth as he coughed hoarsely. Perhaps he had caught what I had. After all, we had been pressing our mucous membranes together every single day.
Even seeing him like that, I twisted my hips invitingly, silently begging. But Arun did not give me what I wanted.
Instead, he reached for my head.
“Haaah…”
After his thick fingers moved for a moment, the gag that had sealed my mouth for so long finally came free. Sticky saliva from the inner surface of the gag that had been in my mouth for nearly ten days dripped down, dirtying my face.
With my newly freed mouth, I spoke to Arun.
“Give it to me… please…”
Arun did not answer.
“Hey, Arun… Aruuun… Make me feel good… please…”
His childhood friend’s face seemed to twist slightly. It did not look like anger so much as a mixture of pity and guilt.
“Kaira. It’s tomorrow. Tomorrow… I’ll let you go.”
Arun spoke dryly, refusing my plea. He coughed again. Even with my mind in ruins, I understood exactly what those words meant.
“……I see.”
I smiled sadly. At last, the moment I had longed for so desperately was coming.
To be pointed at as a witch and killed in front of everyone… How wonderful that would feel.
It wasn’t suicide. That’s right. The only promise I had made with my comrades was not to kill myself. Being captured and executed didn’t count as suicide. I would be keeping my word to the heroes…
To die while being spat on by everyone. How happy I would be…
My corpse will hang there grotesquely, rotting away, eventually torn apart by vagrants for their amusement. Even then… will my body still smell of fresh bread?
A useless thought crossed my mind for a moment.
The instant I pictured my own death, I grew wet between my legs.
“Heehee… ehehe…”
I let out a stupid laugh and tried to move my hips somehow, seeking stimulation against my most secret place. When I realized my weakened body could not manage it, I begged Arun for help.
“Hey, A-Arun… Since it’s the last time, let’s do it… okay? You’re my first love, aren’t you…? Tomorrow your first love is going to be dragged away…? I’ll be locked in prison. I’ll be tortured until my limbs are cut off and I’m covered in blood, then hanged. I’ll become a filthy corpse with my tongue hanging out, piss and shit dripping everywhere…”
I was speaking the most wretched, gloomy words in the most seductive voice imaginable.
“You won’t be able to hold me again. So please, Arun… please do it… I want it, I want it so badly… I’m going crazy, ugh, uuu…”
Arun bit his lip as he looked down at me groveling so shamelessly. Then he shook his head and said,
“I’m sorry, Kaira. For many things.”
With that, he pinched my nose shut, trying to force my mouth open again to replace the gag. I resisted a little, not wanting to lose the freedom I had only just regained after so many days, but my starved and weakened body could not hold its breath for long.
Whether from mental exhaustion or the cold he had caught, the moment he sealed my mouth Arun collapsed onto the cloth he used as a blanket on the floor.
The wheezing sound of his breathing as the illness passed through his lungs was almost pitiful. I had been tied up and violated for days, yet here I was feeling sorry for someone else. The cold must have been quite severe. Had I given it to him?
The moment I realized I was alone with no one to comfort me, a sliver of reason returned. I let out a deep sigh through my nose and grabbed the loosened leather strap around my wrist with both hands.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought of this method. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do it.
I simply had not wanted to escape. The sense of ruin at being trampled and called a criminal by my childhood friend was too addictive, and the pleasure granted by the expectation that execution awaited me at the end was simply too sweet.
Huu.
With a little reason restored, I no longer wanted to die in such a filthy manner. The reason was simple. I still had to find my mother.
And…
There were still so many lower places in this world where I could fall further. Somewhere there had to be an even deeper pit of mud waiting to swallow me, a place where I could roll in even greater misery.
It was a base reason, but it was also what kept me alive right now.
Go back…
I rewound the time of the leather strap.
The strap, which had been rewound to its state as untreated rawhide, the wriggling skin that had once clung to a living animal, soon became too soft to support even the weight of my wrist. It turned into the tender hide it must have been when its owner was still a calf or fetus.
Eventually it snapped with no need for force.
Completely freed from my bonds, I restored the plain dress that had been lying beneath me, half-rotted and stained with sweat, saliva, virgin blood, and excrement, back to its original clean state before putting it on.
Then I placed both hands on the bed. I rewound the bed and its sheets to the state they had been in before I arrived, when they were already worn out.
For the first time, I felt as though I could grasp something clearly. The sensation of the moment the bed had first been made. I thought I could rewind it to just before its materials would break apart, and I succeeded.
It was still cheap, rough, and hard, but standing before the bed restored to newness, I smiled faintly. It was the only gift I could leave for my childhood friend, whom I would probably never see again in my lifetime.
Using magic to create just enough light not to wake Arun, I gathered my things. My leather boots were beside the bed, and my robe and backpack lay in the corner of the room where they had been left. Since I was setting out on a long journey, I rewound the boots and robe by several months as well.
What remained were my own body and Arun’s memories. There was no problem rewinding my own time. As long as I did not faint, it had become routine for me to instinctively create my secret diary with a gesture before falling asleep every night.
I restored my starved and withered body, the cold that had come with weakness, and even my lost virginity to the state they had been in when I was nineteen years and four months old, erasing it all. Then I quietly reached out to the sleeping Arun.
I agonized for a long time over whether to rewind time ten days and erase everything so he could live peacefully, or to leave him with the final moments we had spent together as a parting gift he would remember for the rest of his life.
In the end… I could not do it.
I could not erase my childhood friend’s memories. No matter how much harm it might cause me in the future, no matter what scars it might leave on him, I kept thinking of Zophy on that day when she had blamed me so bitterly. I could not do it.
I knew it was selfish hypocrisy.
If I erased his memories, Arun would be able to live in peace as if nothing had happened. He could forget how he had cruelly trampled me in a trance, forget the dream of expanding his workshop with the bounty money he would receive for selling me, and live an ordinary life.
But I could not do it.
Because I was selfish. Because avoiding my own pain was more important to me than sparing him pain.
Because, just as my comrades had said, I did not possess the mental strength appropriate to the power I held.
“Kaira, I’m sorry… Kaira, Kaira… Don’t die, Kaira… I’m sorry…”
I smiled bitterly as I listened to Arun’s sleep-talking.
So in the end, he still loved me. Even after reducing me to this state.
I pulled the sheet from the bed I had been lying on and gently covered Arun where he lay on the crude cloth.
“Yes, Arun. I’m sorry too. If only I had never come here, you could have lived in peace. I made you feel guilty for nothing. I’m sorry for staying so long just because I was lonely for people.”
Whispering quietly so as not to wake him, I left the small house.
“Just… please don’t think that I was toying with you even though I could have escaped anytime. Stay healthy, Arun…”
My solitary words scattered into the early night air, where starlight trembled in the slightly strong wind.
I drew Mervin’s sword and cut off my long hair, which I had tied and trimmed at the ends, leaving it short enough that the tips barely brushed the nape of my neck. I needed to look as different as possible from the wanted poster.
Letting the cut hair scatter on the wind, I began to walk slowly.
Toward wherever my mother might be.
Away from this small room where Arun slept with his memories intact, and far from this village where I had spent my childhood.