Like Stones for Water

::snaps open book and sighs heavily. One quarter of an ahn to write something. Ugh::

Alright, let me see. Again, reminded of why I spent so many years pretending to illiteracy, why journals are hateful things and commands to fill one even more so. Nevertheless. A command is a command. You seek to know why it is that I find any empowerment, any control in being nothing more than a nameless faceless trio of holes to be filled by men. I am utterly uncertain that I could possibly make you understand, but so be it.

There is a cycle to things, a natural rhythm that sky and earth together understand, each knowing the intricate steps of the dance. Sky knows when to rain, earth knows when to blossom, it is exactly and precisely as the Kings set it to be so. Forever and ever amen, right? Yes, and to every slave there is a rhythm and a dance as well.

Maybe, just maybe I believe that some small fragmentary, perhaps imaginary, segment of the slave populace is destined to find that one man in all the world for whom they were born. If such exists it is surely beyond my experience. Hell, I have never even ever, in all my years as a slave, been worthy of a singular spot in a man's collar. I have gone from brothel to estate to kennels to paga den. Always one among many and frankly, such has suited my purposes.

You see, for rain to fall a need for water must be known. For buds to blossom they must risk storm, infection, plucking and blight. The stones know the real truth. Cast a thousand winds upon the Sardar mountains and what have you got....mountains that still rise, majestic and strong. Cast a single hailstone against a flower and you have the ruination of what could have been beautiful.

I am constantly cast as the premiere tits and ass of whatever chain I serve on. I serve and serve well. I have yet to meet a man I cannot please sexually. To expect me to connect on an emotional level with three, five, seven or more men a day is.....absurd. They are not seeking to know more than how tightly my body grips them or how well my mouth pleases them. To be stone is to survive, throw any man my way and if either of us walks away wounded, let it be the man, else I am unable to serve my purpose the next day and the next and the next and the next...

You spoke of being complacent about sentiment. You could not be more wrong. I am well and truly used to being precisely what I am, a whore for the use of men. I have never been anything else. I know how to earn and how to please, I know how to draw a man in, be it sweetness and gentility he craves or violence he wishes to dispense on flesh he does not own.

Oh make no mistake, I am far from unaware of the needs of men. Those that hold at home cherished free women, even love slaves, that seek me out. Pour water over stones, it slides away, no visible mark left of having done so. Men can walk away sated, exhilerated even, but no mark remains of where they have spent the ahns. The erosion so slow, so infintesimal as to go unnoticed, and so is my slavery. Never burden yourself that I will become too complacent on affection. Truth is I would not know what to do with it if it came my way.

I will not risk the fragile bloom, too short a life built in by the very cycles of nature, borne out in truth again and again, I have witnessed more than one woman sobbing herself to sleep, disconsolate for the want of a man who claimed that elusive love. I find my strength in stone, not as adaptable as clay or as pretty as a blossom but functional, steady, unchanging and secure.

I believe it has been a quarter ahn.....