Returning Home || Alcmene & Rosalba

There were no birds chirping, nor any rustling grass and leaves to listen to. No fireplace crackling or clinking of glass and crinkling of herbs turned to medicine. Instead all that could be heard was the harsh clicking of hooves against stone. Chains and their straps far too tight around flesh, with ragged breaths of exhausted others and the sound of wheels with materials jostling as they went along. Those were the only constant sounds that were heard day in and day out, in this supposedly new laborious life after slaves were seized from their owners. A new life that... If one was to be honest.

Was undoubtedly going to kill them.

Alcmene wasn't fit for such hard labor, despite their large stature. Indeed, the life of a slave owned by the city was something she wouldn't survive at all. They weren't delegated to work inside fixing up and repairing buildings, nor trying to build new ones in light of the riots that wracked the city only a month prior. Instead, they were tasked with hauling carts of materials around for others. A supposedly fitting task for someone with her proportions and limitations, but one that left her exhausted and ragged beyond comprehension as she was made to tow for hours on end. Even then, once the work was over she received little respite as the harsh floors of the districts buildings left her body sore after sleep; and the paltry rations given out in the evening gave her little sustenance or enough calories to keep on weight. As such she could feel each week herself slowly growing lighter, which did little to help her in her daily toil of lugging around carts. If that wasn't enough salt in the wound, the fact that they and many others did not know when they would be returning home (if at all) only increased the stress on her. So by each days end, she couldn't bear to think or bother to listen to her surroundings and soon let herself resign to merely not even thinking at all. It was easier like that to simply mindlessly do whatever tasks given to her than waste energy on trying to figure anything out.

So by the time a month stuck with the labor force had passed, she had basically given up much of her hope that she would ever get out of here. Even when one day she and others like her were rounded up and taken to what she could only barely figured out was a sort of auction, they had little faith that they were going to be taken back to the cushy life of a servile. Alcmene hated slavery as a whole and the entirety of Aodh; but she couldn't deny that she desperately wanted her place back in the estate of her former owner, the mundane if somehow pleasant job of tending to her master's gardens, and the assurance that she wasn't instantly sentenced to death by exhaustion and hard labor. Though with her hope stretched thin as of late, she didn't even think that she would return to such a life. Hopes of escaping this wretched place dashed by the lick of a whip and permanent place among the labor force. Alk believed as a whole she was going to die. Die inside these walls built with the blood of subjugated, and never get to feel or smell her cozy little cottage in Sirith ever again. 

With that, she stood silently among the throngs of other slaves only barely listening to crowds form and citizens of Valore deal with supposed dealings of slaves back to some of their owners. If there was one thing she could think of to get her mind off what was basically her death sentence, was the fact she probably looked like shit at the moment. They couldn't see themselves, but they could feel that their once at least moderately healthy body was withered to a somewhat bony form; their legs and hair matted with grime in certain places from the lack of care and sores from straps and bonds too tight in certain places. Indeed she undoubtedly looked like shit to anyone with eyesight. If her owner could see her now she'd likely be furious if Alk had to think of that. Damn noble was keen on keeping all her property looking well cared for, and Alk wasn't an exception. So the fact she looked like some mange infested animal that would undoubtedly upset her former master, would likely be hilarious if she had any energy to care or laugh.

Though still she stood and waited for her sentence to the labor come to pass. Her inevitable death. Their inevitable fate to be trapped and die as a slave.