Prologue

By George Woodruff

They came like a tidal wave; they swarmed over the city walls and defences like rats. And like rats they attack and tore at everything and anything that crossed their path or caught their fancy. Nothing, no one was safe. The elderly were massacred as they hobbled away or pled for their lives. Babes were ripped from their mothers' bosoms and dashed against walls with careless, heartless cruel abandon. Children were butchered without cause. Women raped without thought, no quarter was given, regardless.

She fled, the smoky air burning in her lungs with each gasping pant as she ran down the streets, fleeing the army of the overlord. But like the rest of the city she was doomed, there was no mercy in this horde. These were brigands, not soldiers, blaguards not men of honour. She had reached the temple district when they caught her. She fought them, determined to die with their blood on her hands. She was denied that desire. They overwhelmed her as she struck the first one to catch her, she gouged his eye, but that was all before they had her pinned.

The injured one screamed as her fingers sank into his socket and as he jerked his head back, hot blood spurted into her hand and down her arm with an urgency of a young lover at his first tryst. The eye came away in her fingers, like a gem popping from its setting in a thief's hand. It fell and landed upon a barrel top as she was flung against the door of a temple.

"Crucify the bitch!" came the howl from the brigand. In a moment she was spread against the unyielding wood of the door, daggers being driven into her wrists to hold her there. She refused to scream as the blades bit into her skin, but as the ruffians continued to pound the daggers into the wood, the shocks that went sliding up her arms like lightning brought them unbidden to her lips. Her cries seemed to excite her captors and as soon as they had nailed her to the door with their daggers, they started to rip her clothes from her, pawing at her body and soon she was practically naked, bleeding and while a pair of them held her legs apart a succession of the others took turns raping her.

Bruised and battered by this travesty she tried still to fight back. Spiting and screaming her defiance at them all the while until the Cyclopes she had made of one of them stepped forward and returned the favour. He slid a dagger beneath her eye and with a pop pried it from its socket. The pain was excruciating and as it flooded her being she passed out from its tidal wave effect upon her.