The Life-Filled Doll

In the busy 'Canterberry Mansion', a young girl carefully scrubbed the floor, making sure no remnants of the previous night remained. The owner of the house -Lord Rowan- was a strange man, she thought. He would spend the entire night having sex, but then the next morning he would want a clean room that had the scent of blooming flowers.

She was a new maid in the place and had come only a week ago. But even then she knew that no matter what, the word of the Lord was law. She had seen what had happened to a boy who had dared to defy him. The boy had been tortured personally by the Lord in the centre of the town until he finally gave into his whims.

"Ouch!" the girl cried out in pain. She had been so lost in her thoughts that she didn't even notice the shard of glass on the floor and had pricked her finger on it.

She tore a bit of cloth from her skirt and wrapped it around her finger. She wasn't sure she would survive the day if her blood stained the pearl white marble floor.

Suddenly she heard a crash in the room the Lord was. Followed by him shouting at the messenger who had arrived a few minutes ago.

Curiously, she stood up and peeked out of the door at the room at the end of the hallway. She could still hear the Lord screaming about something, and she knew that whatever it was, it was something that he didn't want to happen. Something about the Organisation. It wasn't hard to guess that. The Lord would not care one bit if the Kingdom was attacked. He would be calm and collected even then. For he had the Organisation. An empire far richer and greater than any Kingdom. An empire that was far larger than any of the tiny kingdoms on the continent. And was legal on every single one of them, no matter how hard they tried to stifle their business.

Deciding that she had heard enough of the muffled shouts from the room, the girl went back to scrubbing the cold tile floor, her mind still wondering about what could have the Lord so riled up. About what could be a threat to the Organisation that even Kings did not dare to go against it.

As she continued to scrub the floor, her thoughts drifted to the yearly contest the Organisation. It was a contest that determined the most valuable Dolls - by degrading them in front of crowds, by seeing if they were broken enough to be melded how they wished. She had seen the #1 Doll once. She had been broken beyond repair. Her eyes almost lifeless. A living doll. Most of the top hundred were the same.

Except that one woman. She looked at least 16 years old. She had expected the girl to be broken like the others, considering the fact that it was her first contest. But she wasn't. Her eyes were filled with life. And she looked more than happy to follow the rules of the Organisation. She had immediately become a model for all the Dolls. Not because she was beautiful - in fact, she was pretty ordinary looking with her brown eyes and hair and her not so voluptuous body. It was her obedience that got her into the top fifty. And her ability to please people. She became the kind of person they wanted her to be - she could change her personality within seconds. One moment she would be a innocent little girl who didn't know what sex was and then the very next moment she would be a seductive woman who could make even a celibate yearn for her.

At the beginning, she pitied the girl for what she may have gone through. But that pity soon disappeared when the girl began spilling their secrets to their Masters.

She still could remember that incident. Some Dolls, including her brother, had planned an escape from there. They were going to leave on the night of the Festival of Hope. But they didn't get to. They were captured by the guards of the Organisation before they even left their cells and, on that very night, were whipped on the altar of the God of Hope. And she had seen that Doll watch them whip her brother and the other Dolls even after they passed out. She hadn't even seem fazed.

A few days later when she confronted the Doll, she didn't even deny that she had told the guards about them.

"What will you do? Kill me? Hurt me?" the Doll had laughed. "Be glad that I haven't told them about your brother's nightly escapades with Lord Logan's daughter. Not that she's interested in him anyway."

The girl shook her head. She had to forget about things like that. Anger would not be useful to her if she ever wanted to escape from this place. If she ever wanted to fulfill her promise to her brother. She was lucky that she was not a Doll, she at least had a chance of escaping her wretched life, unlike her brother.

A few minutes later, she was done scrubbing the floor. The bed would be cleaned later by another maid. So the girl stood up and picked the pail and cloth and turned around to leave but stood dead in her tracks on seeing the man at the door.

She quietly greeted him with: "Good Morning, Lord Rowan." with her head down while hoping that he would ignore her.

There was silence for a few moments before he asked her, "How old are you?"

"Fifteen." she whispered, not daring to look at him. She silently prayed to all the Gods and Goddesses that he would ignore her, that her body would not be violated that day. But she had forgotten that the Gods and Goddesses did not exist, or, even if they did, they only cared about the rich and powerful.

She heard the Lord mutter something about her being too old for his liking, but before she could let out a sigh of relief, he shut the door behind him and dragged her to the still dirty bed. He pushed her under himself and began to tear her clothes.

The girl closed her eyes hearing the Lord ripping her clothes to shreds. She should have expected it, she thought. She may not be a Doll, but she was not very different from one. She wasn't bound to the Lord by the Oath of Belonging, but she could have been, had she been pretty enough. The only thing that stopped her from becoming a Doll was the scar on her face she had got when she was five. It was a burn scar and covered her entire left cheek. It had stopped many men from touching her, but not the Lord.

So she tried to accept the reality and beared the pain she felt, for she had to escape from the Organisation. For her brother if not for herself. Or else, his death would be in vain.

___ ___ ___ ___ ___

The girl dragged herself to the Servants' Quarters. She was wearing a half-torn towel as her clothes had been ripped to shreds by the Lord. Her body ached all over. She wondered how her brother beared the pain everyday and yet manged to smile at her.

The maids in the quarters seemed to be talking about something. But the girl ignored their talks. She wanted to rest for a few hours. She needed some time to fully understand what the Lord had done to her.

"Lyn, are you alright?" asked a maid. She looked concerned.

Lyn opened her mouth to answer her but no words escaped her mouth. She felt her body go weak and black spots dance in her eyes. Then her sight went dark.

___ ___ ___ ___ ___

Lyn woke up in her bunk to a dull pain in her lower body. She slowly opened her eyes and the first thing she saw was the amulet next to her. It was a gift from her brother. She looked away from it. She didn't want to think about him. She wondered how had he beared the pain. She felt like killing herself already. She wondered how.

"Are you feeling better now?" asked the maid next to her.

Lyn looked at the maid. She would have been pretty of she didn't have that strange disease because of which she developed discolored patches on her skin, Lyn thought.

"Yes." Lyn croaked. Her voice sounded harsh, which was understandable after spending two hours screaming and begging the Lord to stop.

The maid gave her a tiny smile. She understood what had happened. It was something all the servants had gone through. And the best thing she could offer Lyn now was some support.

Lyn felt irritated. There was a lot of noise in the quarters, a lot more than usual she realised. The servants usually talked with care and made sure that they were as silent as mice. But now, they were talking not whispering.

"What happened?" she asked the maid. If it were any normal day, Mr Grant would be in here and whipping them already.

"Ah," the maid said with a strange look on her face. "You see, a Master was killed by his Doll."

"So what? That does happen once in a while." Lyn said, her throat dry. And then she asked, "Also, could you give me some water?"

"The killing of a Master was not surprising," the maid answered as she poured some water for Lyn in a steel cup. "It's how he was killed, and by whom."

Lyn took the cup and put it to her lips. She almost moaned with pleasure when she swallowed the cool water, soothing her parched throat.

"Do you want me to continue?" asked the maid with a little smile.

Lyn nodded her head. She had a feeling it had something to do with why the Lord was so angry.

"The body was found yesterday," the maid continued. "at the Master's villa near the Capital of Arielle. Apparently, the body was badly mutilated. The man had been stripped naked and tortured for quite some time - it was obvious by the expression of horror on his face. One maid claimed that his brain had been cut and thrown on the floor and another says that his eyeballs had been gouged out and thrown on the floor along with his innards."

"That.... sounds brutal..." Lyn muttered. "But why did the Master decide to trust the Doll? We can't be trusted, forget about the Dolls." she wondered aloud.

"That is the most shocking part. Do you remember the Doll that had been called the 'Life-Filled Doll'? The doll that joined the top 100 Dolls in her first year?"

"Yes..." Lyn answered quietly. She would never forget her, for what role she had played in her brother's death. But why was the maid mentioning her now? She could be called a loyal member of the Organisation,.... unless she was the one who had killed her master. And slowly she felt all things fall in place. It would explain why the Lord was pissed. Not only did a Master die, but one of their top Dolls had killed him in the most brutal way possible. And had escaped.