Chapter 2

"Walk! Walk! Use your legs to walk!" The other trafficker held a whip made out of thin-cut leather that would surely hurt if it was slapped on her skin, thought the girl as she obediently followed their instruction to enter the underground.

She looked around the place which was created like a jail for prisoners that the girl once heard from the villager's gossips. Inside each cell, women older than her by few ages looked terrifyingly ill and slender to the bones as though their life had been sucked out from the place they were living in.

The dimmed long corridor that seemed to have no edge, cold gust of wind that often came out of nowhere and the flickering lantern brought nothing but more dread to her.

As she was inspecting the whole place, a shrilling scream from an unknown woman made her small feet to stop in fear. Her hands trembled and her knees were about to give in when the girl in front of her had fallen first and shrieked from the pool of blood that stream down to the corridor from the other cell.

"What are you fucking doing?! Stand up!" The guardsman loudly screamed as he whipped the girl who fell with his leash. Following the hard slapping sound, fresh blood dripped down in a diagonal strike on the girl's skin, making her shuddered in fear.

I shouldn't fall no matter what, the girl thought to herself and further walked down the corridor to the cell that gradually grew dimmer. She couldn't see the end of the corridor as it was dark but the deeper she goes in, the frightening it became.

The long corridor for her small wounded legs tired her out. Not only the fear and uneasiness catching up to her, the tears that she tirelessly held back glossed out her blue eyes.

Not long after the direction her fellow carriage mate fell, the man stopped at a place and unlocked the cell that was made of iron bars and pushed her in harshly. As her body was smaller than the average girls at her age, she fell miserably to the floor making her knees bleed out.

The guards couldn't care less if any of them was wounded as he had too many other slaves and whammed the door with a clanking noise. Seeing him disappeared for a moment, she drew out a breath and stood up from her place trotting with uneven steps to the corner of the room. On the corner, the girl slumped down and hugged her knees to bury her head.

What did she do that her aunt would send her to the places that those men called hell on earth? She had behaved very well last time, abiding by all their heartless order and beatings, but that wasn't enough as in the end, they sell her away.

"A- Are you alright?" A woman spoke in a hushed tone crouching next to the little girl, appearing from the shadow beside her to sit nearer with her.

The girl looked up and nodded without a word, to be exact she didn't know what to say as her state at the moment was far from alright.

The woman felt insensitive for asking such a question to the girl and continued.

"Of course, you wouldn't be alright. Sorry, that was dense of me. However, it's better for you not to cry aloud, or else those evil men from before would come back with punishments."

The girl nodded her head vigorously and pursed her lips. Her last wish was to be whipped by those men's whip. Once her uncle once also beat her with a horsewhip and she would rather do anything than getting the same pain on her back.

"I'm Aurby, what's your name girl?"

"I- My na-" The girl covered her chapped lips and coughed a few times in succession. Her throat felt dried up as though sands were stuck in between when she tried to speak.

After two days of riding the carriage, the merchants weren't any kinder than her aunt and gave her only a mouthful of water a day. She also didn't eat neutering for two days, making her head feel dizzy. She was used to being forbid from eating and drinking and told to only work but the last time she properly eat and drink, the little girl herself couldn't even remember.

"Are you alright?" Hearing how rouge she coughed that sounded as though blood could slip out from her lips, Aurby raised her hushed voice slightly.

The young girl rubbed her neck where she could feel it hurts.

"My throat is very dry. It hurts."

"They must've been giving the same treatment for us to a young girl like you. " Aurby said with a sloping sad frown.

"My name is Ariana. Nice to meet you, Aurby." Ariana greeted lightly with the same whisper. She looked around at the other girls who had been laying low without greeting her unlike Aurby a bit worried.

The person before in the corridor who had lost her blood to the floor still remained in her head. She had seen someone died out of losing blood and knew that losing blood wasn't a good thing. Although she knew she could have had the same fate as the woman before, she felt even more worried for them than herself.

Hearing their conversation, the young girl's heart sunk to cold ice. Her prayer couldn't reach God yet and it already been stamped all over in the mud.

The word hell on Earth was not a new term for her as she heard it from the priests before. Hell was the place which was filled with unending burning fire, sharp cliffs with piercing stones bellow that would tear your heart once you fell in, a frightening place for sinners.

But she had not made any sins that could lead her to hell. She couldn't understand, why would her aunt send her there? 

Hours and hours on the carriage, the sky turned black twice before the carriage finally halted its place on the destination. On her whole way to the slave building, she couldn't form any conversation with the other older girls as they kept their mouth tightly pursed all the time, ignoring her.

Perhaps they were also scared, comforted the girl to herself.

After hearing the conversation of the slavery traffickers that her place would be worst than hell, the young girl had no other choice than imagining the worst outcome that would soon be her fate.

As she was drowning on her thoughts, the previous slave trafficker who threatened her aunt knocked on the roof of the tent.

"Wake up, damned beings! We are going down now!" He shouted before lowering the railing guards of the carriage tent for the girls to go down.

Being the first one to be pulled by the slave trafficker, the young girl had long accepted her series of misfortune with a gloom heart.

It hurt, her body hurt, her throat hurt, and her hips hurt. But she has no place to complain nor make a grunt from it.