Quoted By:
>Goblins.
>Piercings
Once you wriggle free from the overturned cart, you put your body through its paces and stretch the way your mother taught you before she died of plague. She kept herself limber for her work at the village tavern, but the practices pays off for more than just bending your limbs in odd angles and keeping certain delicate places tight. It helps to banish soreness and stiffness near as well as a cleric's healing spell, helps keep your body trim and taught, and helps restore energy in general. The sequence you did with your mother each morning - and now do alone before her ashes - moved between thirteen poses.
Embracing Heaven. Falling to Earth. Downward Cow. Three Legged Cow. Hero's Triumph. Reed in the Wind. Bending Reed. Centered Flower Bend. Twisted Flower Bend. North Maiden's Answer. Open Lunar Cycle. Waning Lunar Cycle. Closed Lunar Cycle.
Once your get through all of those, most of the pain has gone away. Your head still throbs like an angry sun, begging for salt and water. Your bosom still feels freshly mauled by some ravenous beast, but the pain only goes skin deep, and spreads across the rest of your body with this raw, sore feeling that comes in strange patterns.
You would blame part of that pain upon the studs of polished bone that have pierced through four particularly delicate places upon your body. The piercings themselves do not feel painful, but you are certainly <span class="mu-i">painfully</span> aware of their existence upon your body. You can feel three studs upon the flesh of your tongue, two upon the blossoming crowns of your bosom, and one more through a place that you would rather not describe. A part of your mind idly wonders if they would <span class="mu-i">enhance</span> certain private activities... and a darker place wonders how your captors made use of them.
You clap your cheeks and shake such thoughts away. Your voice is dry and hoarse, but you need the vocal reminder that, "This is just what you get for going past the Wardenstones on your own, Tanya. Nothing more, nothing less, and nothing you need to worry about."
Saying that out loud takes a heavy weight off your chest.
The weight that remains behind is heavier than you remember it being, which leaves you with more questions better left unspoken. There's no point in asking how long you've been the captive of a tribe of goblins. You would not be the first young woman to lose time to the less than tender mercies of such monsters, and you will not be the last. Nor would you be the first young woman to return to society from such an ordeal, through escape or rescue from them by a troop of knights or party of adventurers.
It helps that the goblins have all been killed. There's not enough light in this lichen-filled cavern for you to get a good idea of what killed them, but pawing around through their corpses tells you a tale of puncture wounds and deep gashes. Their coagulated blood reeks of rotting meat, which tells you that whatever killed them was not looking for a meal.
