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Behind Those Eyes	By : CanPsycho337 Category: G through L Series > Gor Views: 9735 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Gor and I make no profit from this story.

Chapter List
- 7
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Hardening
The next several months saw Sariah change from the small, wispy girl she had been to a woman of war. Every day, she trained with Nox, and every day she found that she got a little faster, a little stronger, a little better.
She hadn’t been wrong when she’d thought that she’d only scratched the surface of what Nox had to show her. Though her education had started with the sword, she now trained with any one of a dozen weapons.
Once Nox had managed to push her beyond her fear of pain and death, Sariah had learned that the mind could accomplish anything and a properly trained body would follow the mind like a faithful servant.
In the time that she’d been training, Sariah had lost all of what remained of her baby fat. Now her body tensed and rippled with whipcord-like muscle every time she leaned forward to thrust, or jumped out of the way of a slash.
Also, she had begun to grow taller.
Though it was hard for her to remember enough to be certain, she felt that she now stood even taller than her mother had. Pain twisted inside of her as she thought of Myranda, but it no longer hampered her efforts. Instead, she simply twisted it into fuel to continue her training.
It was, to her mind, the natural evolution of the lesson that Nox had taught her when she’d first arrived at Daden’s hall. Her first step had been to realize that there was life after pain and torment. The next, and one that she was now taking to heart, was learning to harness it for her own ends.
As she briefly meditated on the progress that she had made, she felt a sudden change in the wind. It caused her flesh to dot itself with goosebumps. Prior to her training, Sariah would have done nothing more than turn to see what had caused it, but now she didn’t bother.
Instead, she let her instincts guide her as she threw herself out of the way of the incoming blade. She moved through the air deftly, as if she were part Tarn, before diving into a somersault and coming up in a crouch with her own sword in ready position.
Beside her, she saw Stolas stumble as her sudden disappearance left him with nothing but air to swipe at, instead of either the flesh or sword he had expected to encounter.
Even though they used training blades of blunted wood with metal covering, a full hit with a practice sword could still cause serious damage. Several times in her training, Sariah had needed to be tended to by a Physician for potentially life-threatening injuries.
Nox had made it clear that first day that no mercy would be shown to her. Mercy was for the weak, and more importantly, mercy got you killed. Every bump, bruise, broken bone or worse had been an object lesson in that singular truth.
Taking that truth to heart, and deriving no small amount of satisfaction at the prospect of teaching that lesson to sleen called Stolas, Sariah leapt forward and swung her sword. She connected with his ribs in such a way that the force of his misstep was perfectly countered by the force of her swing.
She felt several of his ribs snap and saw him drop immediately to the ground, clutching his abdomen and gasping for air that wouldn’t come. From the side of her vision, Sariah saw a figure move into view. Before she even saw the green of the Physician’s robe she knew who it was.
As the months had passed and she had continued to progress, both she and her teacher had taken to playing for keeps. More often than not, Nox still bested her on the courtyard ground and each time he did, he made her pay the price for failure. But on occasion, she had bested him and had shown him the same tender mercies he’d visited on her.
Sometimes she could feel Daden watching from somewhere up above in the tower. She rarely saw him and had not spoken with him even once since the day that he’d freed her. At night, she took her meals alone in her chamber-too exhausted to do anything other than eat and sleep, even if she’d been invited to the main hall with the others.
Daden never visited her and Nox never mentioned him. She knew that to ask after her former Master would only serve to give Nox an opening to exploit, so she kept silent on the matter. Eventually, she would have her answers, or she wouldn’t.
Looking down at the Physician, she kept her face impassive as she watched Stolas writhe under the pain of his injury. There was a part of her that wanted to sneer at the short, unremarkable looking man, to gloat that she had hurt him at least a little in the way that he’d allowed her to be hurt.
The memory of her rape rose unbidden as it occasionally did, and she forced it back down. It was the one hurt that she had yet to learn to use to fuel her. The only thing that she could think of that was more traumatic than the death of her mother. It wasn’t so much that it had happened, she’d dealt with that even before she’d arrived in Ko-ro-ba.
It was the knowledge that it had been orchestrated by the pig who lay before her, who had done it on the orders of a man that she’d all but thrown herself at during the slave auction. The beautiful man who’d purchased her, who’d freed her and was now having her trained so that no man could ever hurt her again. Furthermore, it was the knowledge that try as she might, she could not bring herself to hate Daden.
But she could hate Stolas plenty.
The wind change behind her once again, but this time Sariah did nothing. She knew that another attack was not forthcoming, but instead that her teacher had come to stand behind her.
“You might have killed him,” Nox said, his cold voice matter-of-fact and containing not hint of condemnation.
“Unlikely,” She replied simply. “Stolas is a sleen, but he is strong and the Physician was near. He has had worse and will likely have worse again.”
She no longer had any qualms about speaking her mind to her teacher, or about discussing her continued hatred of Stolas, even in the man’s presence. Stolas was a powerful fighter, skilled and experienced, but he was not the war dancer that Nox or Daden were.
His strength came more from being so difficult to pick out of a crowd, so unremarkable and easy to dismiss. On the occasion that Stolas wasn’t so easily dismissed, the shorter man tended to use his brute strength and ferocity to throw his opponent off guard. In many this worked to devastating effect, but to one who had been trained by Nox of the many voices, it was a crude and increasingly underwhelming style.
“You like that he is hurt,” Nox stated after a moment.
“I do,” Sariah answered. There was no need nor desire in her to deny the fact. “It pleases me.”
“As it pleased me to watch you so helpless, chained to the wall.”
She had braced herself for the comment, knowing that Nox would take the opportunity to remind her of how he had also violated her. Still it stung, but not nearly as bad as what Stolas had done to her. Nox, to her mind, had always been a monster. Daden, through Stolas, had presented as a friend and then betrayed her. “Exactly,” She responded.
“Perhaps I will chain you again,” Nox pushed further, apparently unsatisfied with his inability to get inside her mind. “Perhaps I will leave you there forever.”
“You will not,” Sariah responded. Her voice was firm, not with command as if she were ordering Nox not to consider it, but with certainty that it would not come to pass.
“How can you be sure?”
“I am sure,” She responded, her voice echoing his in its matter-of-fact tone. “Because if you attempt it, either you will die or I will. Likely, it would be the latter as I doubt I am good enough to best you in combat. But I am good enough to ensure that I will not be taken alive again if I don’t wish it, even by you.”
Her words were greeted by silence and a moment later she felt the wind change again and she knew that he had gone. Left to her own devices, she watched a moment longer as Stolas was bandaged up and helped to his feet.
The man fixed her with his brown eyes in a look that she found hard to interpret. There was anger certainly, also embarrassment at being bested by her, perhaps jealousy that she had progressed beyond him so quickly and something else that she didn’t quite catch.
It almost looked like regret.
Almost.
- 7
- 8
- 9
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Behind Those Eyes