The Last Flowers Ch. 01

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An unsafe forest and a town that thinks she's a whore.
4.9k words
4.35
19.8k
35

Part 1 of the 15 part series

Updated 06/09/2023
Created 05/26/2018
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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.

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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.

"He said they were gone by the time he got there."

Sarielle plucked a low hanging fruit. "Doesn't sound like he was very close. How does he know they weren't just fucking?"

Kerensa gasped. "Sarielle, Language!"

She rolled her eyes. "Please. Who's here to care? We know every girl in the village and it wasn't any of them. Is he suggesting there are stray women roaming the hillside waiting to be attacked? He probably came across some lovers enjoying a romp."

"He said he's never heard a woman shriek like that."

"I highly doubt he's made anyone shriek like that. He looks the type to fill a maid and fall asleep."

"Sae! You are the vilest girl around. Where did you learn these things?"

"I had an older brother."

That cast a sombre mood over them. It was many years ago now, but they all remembered when Dagen was killed in a cart accident on his way to sell cheese and the leather bags her family made. That road was more dangerous than any mystical forest.

"Hoi!" shouted Abelia. The short blonde waved as she approached, jogging the last few metres to the other girls. "Why do we have an escort?"

"It's in case anyone in the forest tries to rape us," Kerensa said with a sneer.

Sarielle lobbed a rotten apple into the air. She'd had enough of this. "How do they know there's someone out here looking to rape us? Who's to say it's not one of the town boys we should be watchful of? What if it's him who wants to rape us?" She said loud enough for Torian to hear.

He frowned. "I don't want to rape you. You've got a loud mouth."

Sarielle climbed into the twisted braches of a tree and let it cradle her. After a few minutes she grew weary of the silence. "Dagen used to talk about other places a lot. I went with him a few times. Out there, is...I can't explain it, but it's nothing like here. The people here are very closed-minded in comparison. I didn't like it at the time. It was too unfamiliar, but the older I get...I know why so many people move when they finish school. You're an adult at eighteen. You don't have to get married. Everyone can screw whoever they like and you don't have to wait until you're twenty."

Sarielle had been pissed off that day. She'd felt the tension in the other girls. There was a nervousness to them. And it wasn't the forest that had them on edge.

Just after Sarielle's eighteenth birthday they heard more whisperings about the merits of chastity belts, despite them not being used anywhere else in the land. A couple of the girls already had them for trips outside of the town, but one of the older boys had snuck into a town meeting and began teasing the girls about what he'd heard from some of the more vocal men. "They're going to lock your pussies up," he'd said. "It's the only way to stop you being sluts."

"We don't need them. One look at your face would put anyone off sex," Sarielle had replied. She'd scored several dirty looks that day from girls who blamed her for flaming the anti-whore fire.

It didn't happen overnight. It leached in like dark water. The eccentric ideas of a few spread like illness. As the weeks passed, people got belts fashioned for their older daughters. They saw others doing it, so they felt obliged, following like sheep. They swallowed what they were told, believed it was for the best. And they taught the young women that too. Some even volunteered. It was for their protection after all. The idea was they could wear the devices when they went off to pick fruit, or left the town centre. So they'd be protected from whatever dangers lurked in the forest.

In early winter, another girl went missing, this time with no trace. Weeks later a hunter claimed to have seen her in the forest sporting a rounded belly, though he lost sight of her immediately. Her parents defended her virtue, stating that if it was indeed her, someone or something in the forest must be responsible. The townsfolk liked that idea a little too much. It matched their beliefs about the forest. There was one man in particular who was always ranting about the things in that forest, things from the darklands, he reckoned.

***

Steam rose from the water in the sink. Sarielle's hands were pink from the heat, but she dared not pause for it to cool down. She needed to have the dishes washed before her father left for the monthly meeting. She didn't want to miss anything.

She could hear his bare feet on the wooden floor as he walked in. He had his good pants on and was doing up the buttons on his shirt.

"Have you got your belt on, Sae?"

It wasn't a question. It was a prompt to make her get it.

"But I'm at home and it's uncomfortable."

"It's to keep you safe when I'm not here to protect you."

"I'll lock the door. No one can get to me."

He sighed. "We've talked about this. I'm your father. It's my job to be your guardian and stop you from making wrong choices. I don't want a momentary lapse of judgement to ruin your life. You already know what it's like to be tainted. You don't want to end up like Aster."

Sarielle sat the last bowl down to dry and scampered off to her room to put on the dreaded piece of metal. It consisted of a curved strip of metal that ran between the legs and attached to a band around the waist. A hole at the back and a slit at the front allowed for waste to pass through. It was cold against her skin and uncomfortable in every way.

Sarielle came back out and hitched her skirt to her right hip so he could lock the padlock with its key. Her father wasn't one of those preaching for their confinement, nor was he one of those against it. Sometimes he was lax about her wearing her belt, but he'd made her put it on tonight because a gathering of most of the adults was the perfect opportunity for her to run off and get impregnated.

Her father picked up his coat. "I shouldn't be too long. Do you have something to do?"

"There's some sewing left and lacework."

"You haven't finished that?"

"If you helped I would be finished by now."

He gave her a look that told her not to sass him. "We all have our work." He walked to the door.

"Goodbye, Father." She stood meekly with her hands behind her back until the door shut, then she went into her room and collected her mother's sewing box. She set up the table to look like she'd just fixed her father's shirt. Maybe if he knew how to sew, he'd know it shouldn't take that long, but he didn't. When she was young he taught her how to do things to help around the home, but once she got better at it, he stopped helping her and now she did all the cooking and cleaning, as well as helping with the goats.

She grabbed her coat and snuck out the door, slinking along in the shadows. The meeting had just started when she arrived at the town hall. She put her bare foot on a hitching rail outside the neighbouring building and used the wall to help her stand up. Her fingers grabbed the edge of the roof and she hauled herself up, wincing at the belt digging into her skin.

Kerensa was already pressed against the wall, peering in through a tiny ventilation window. Sharing concerns over the town's governing, some of the older teens had taken to listening in to the meetings. What they heard was getting worse every month. Since the chastity belts had become popular, certain individuals, including the patriarch, had convinced people the women needed protecting from themselves. Most of them were now made to wear their belts anytime they were alone, but it was progressing to anytime they left the house as well. The problem was the belts weren't designed to be worn for extended periods of time. They were made from cheap metal and built by a blacksmith cum armourer, not a jeweller. The metal rubbed and dug in, causing rashes and cuts. Sarielle complained to her father and her former teacher, the latter of whom told her she was a whining sinner, who'd earned the device for her wicked ways. All the women were experiencing similar issues and parents who were sick of welts and skin infections were bound to be arguing for a solution tonight.

"Did I miss anything?" Sarielle whispered.

"No, they're talking about that silly road again."

Sarielle liked Kerensa. She was one of the few who didn't care about her status. After 'the incident' all the girls stopped talking to her, just as they had Aster. But her indiscretions weren't unforgivable. She was still a virgin in the town's eyes, so she was only slightly tainted. Most people kept their thoughts to themselves. Only a couple of adults gave her dirty looks or refused to serve her. The girls started talking to her again, those that were permitted to anyway, but not like they had before.

Kerensa frowned. "I heard something today that I don't think you'll like."

"Oh?"

"I saw Mirabelle in the street so I asked her why she wasn't at school. She told me the four teenage girls aren't to go anymore as there's nothing left to teach that's of any relevance to them. They can continue to learn homemaking and crafts from their mothers or at workshops, but because the girls aren't doing any further education there's no point teaching them anything beyond the basics."

It had long been the case that women weren't allowed to do further studies in the city like the boys were. But to not let them finish school?

Sarielle stared at her in disbelief. "What...?" She could feel the rage inside her bubbling up. "This is going too far."

"I know."

"It's to keep us here, to make it impossible for us to go study anything and get ideas or the means to stay there."

"Why would they do that?"

"Think about it. Most of these guys don't have wives. If I'm gone, my father has to cook, clean, do all the washing, AND care for the goats. Of course he wants me to stick around. Who's going to do all that if I get married or go to the city? And the younger men agree because they all want a wife to be their slave too."

What if it kept going? What if girls weren't allowed to go to school at all? Then they would have to rely on the men to read and write for them. She was suddenly glad there were only a couple of young children in the town. If it was this bad now, what would it be like by the time they were teenagers?

"You're really smart. I never would have thou—" Kerensa held her finger to her lips. "Shh."

They both listened to the discussion on the other side of the wall. The townsfolk had moved on to the woes of chastity belts. The meeting was led by the patriarch, a portly man with a potbelly and grey hair. Beside him was the chancellor, a tall, thin man with a black moustache. Anyone else could come to the front or stand if they wished to speak.

"I understand what you're saying, but they simply aren't practical for everyday use. I found mine unbearable enough on the short trips I used to take and you want to put girls in them all day?" argued one of the few women in the room. This issue had roused their interest enough for them to make an appearance. It wasn't forbidden for womenfolk to attend, but they were heavily discouraged by their husbands.

Abelia's mother stood up. "It's true. I'm concerned about my daughter's virtue so I've been trying to get her to wear it more often, but it makes her skin rash."

The patriarch waved them to sit. "Ladies, thank you for raising your concerns."

Kerensa's father was already up, waiting to speak. "My daughter's always had such a nice disposition. Now she's always frowning when I get home. And it takes her longer to do her chores because it hinders her movement."

There was muttering around the room. The patriarch stamped his staff on the floor twice to quiet them. A brawny man came onto the dais. Hevani's father was one of the most outspoken men in the village. "It would unwise to cease the use of such a device. Perhaps her belt simply needs adjusting, a better fitting design to complement her shape."

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