------------- SGL - Fallon Bree Shanahan

Fair winds rustled the leaves overhead. Birds flitted in the thickets and chirped wildly at the first warmth of spring. The brook gurgled nearby. Down the hill, across the heath, farmer McTurnin was pushing his plow through a muddy field. He often found himself pushing it, as the mule he'd bought last summer in County Shellien was as useful to the task as a leprechaun's nose hairs. Fallon lay in the shade of a great willow, the spring grass tickling her naked back. The sky above was blue and white, but those clouds wouldn't threaten a drop for a day or more. The rays of Apos played peek-a-boo with her skin which left her warm on the one side and damp and cool on the other. She lay there in all her splendor, naked as the day she was born, a shameless hussy her mother would've called her. Just past sixteen, she was already the darling of County Kalishfri, with every young buck who cared nothing for his reputation chasing her skirt. It was just as well she shunned skirts on a day as beautiful as this. She'd think to give farmer McTurnin the thrill of life, or shock depending on your point of view, were it not for that damnable humming coming up the old castle road. Fallon snatched up her clothes and took off at a full sprint across the heather, farmer McTurnin shocked out of cussing his mule, but not quick enough to see who it was, that willful sprite that danced through his field stark naked. Just at the edge of her mother's fence, she turned back to see if the Avandorian nuns had managed to make hide or hair of the excited man's jabbering. Then a hand grabbed her and pulled her over the fence.

It wasn't her mother's hand that grabbed her so rough. It was a monstrous claw of rotten looking blue-gray hide, and the stench of Goblin went with it. Fallon jerked her head back from another blow. She shook her red-brown locks, made dull gray by the underdark mud that covered her form head to toe. She smiled a hateful, belligerent, defiant smile and spit blood in the Hobgoblin's face. She started to launch into another tirade of cussing, when a shadow caught her attention. She stifled her rebuke and turned her head slowly to look into the eyes of her true captor, the monster that was given the duty of breaking her, making her docile and servile, before her sale as a slave in the vile streets of Skullport. The Beholder blinked its central eye and sneered. Fallon lowered her gaze, but made sure she looked up through a furled and hateful brow. Little of her true beauty was visible just now, so beaten and filthy was she. Perhaps her mother had been right all those years ago in her homeland so far away. Her lustful and wanton ways had landed her in the deepest pit of despair she could have imagined. But if there was one thing she'd gotten from her roguish father, was an indomitable will and a hellion's streak of defiance a mile wide. She'd yet see those monstrous eyes drained of life, all eleven of them.

------------- Credits

------------- Thanks and please comment.