Chapter 143 The Depraved Bargain
Crushed by pain and fatigue and enveloped by the darkness of the room,
Erika fell back on the cot and dozed off for a short time, and then awakened,
her mouth dry as sand, to the sound of a distant pounding. She lay almost
motionless on the cot for a while, pushing away its only bedcovering, a thin
horsehair blanket no bigger than a large towel, whose skin-scratching coarseness
did her nude body as much harm as its warmth did her good.
Erika stroked her aching thighs and shoulders with gentle fingers,
trying to soothe the muscles that Slegg's carnival of bondage had stretched and
bent and contorted to their very limits. She wiped at the remaining traces of
the fiery nuoc cham that clung to her private parts, but she quickly found that
her sweaty fingertips seemed to spread the paste rather than remove it, and she
desisted, thankful that the irritation caused by the chili paste had lessened
considerably since it had first been applied to her body.
But the soreness resulting from her rough treatment and the
half-completed rapes by first Slegg and then the Malayans could not be so easily
dispelled. Her hands moved to her breasts and gently caressed the mounds that
Slegg and his men had handled with such barbaric brutality. She winced in pain
when her fingertips found her nipples; the thrice-applied nipple-cords had left
the tips of her breasts as sensitive as open wounds. Wounds into which Raka had
sunk his thumbs and teeth with virile delight.
As she tended to her injuries as best she could and tried to keep her
mind from dwelling on her raging thirst, Erika heard the clatter of footsteps
and the grunts and curses of men who seemed to be straining under heavy burdens
in the labyrinth of corridors on that level of the ship. She listened intently
as the ominous sound of hammering began again on the deck above her and
continued almost uninterruptedly for minute after anxious minute. At length it
struck her that the sailors were in the process of transferring lumber from the
Bird Cage, below decks, to the upper level of the ship.
Her nerves having been scraped raw by her long ordeal, Erika was plagued
by gruesome images of every engine of torment she had seen during her
enslavement to George Chan or that he had proudly pointed out to her in his vast
collection of sadistic erotica. Mongol chieftains, Chinese warlords, Japanese
shoguns, Indian rajahs, Persian sultans -- in the collection of George Chan,
none had been without exquisite young maidens who were entirely at their
disposal. Nor had they lacked for ingenious instruments of torture to deal with
the young beauties who had proved unwilling or rebellious.
Trying to rid herself of such dire imaginings, Erika pulled herself up
onto her hands and knees on the crude cot. She knelt there, shivering in her
nakedness for a few moments, smoothing her hands over her thighs, trying to
quiet the nagging ache in her muscles. At least, she consoled herself, these
last few minutes of self-examination had suggested that despite her long ordeal,
neither Slegg nor his bloodthirsty shipmates had so far done her body any
permanent injury.
Grimacing with discomfort, Erika eased her legs out from under her and
onto the hard floor of the infirmary. After taking a few deep breaths, she
lifted herself up and began to inch along a wall in the darkness, hoping to find
something in the tiny room that she could put to use to lessen her misery.
But the infirmary, she soon found, was not much better equipped to tend
to the sick or injured than a bare prison cell would have been. As she felt her
way around walls covered with years of accumulated grime, the pounding of
Deng's hammer continued to assail her ears. When she came to the first corner
she turned slightly and then continued to make her way along the adjoining
second wall until she stumbled over something in the corner of the room farthest
from the door. Wincing at the pain shooting through her stubbed toe, she bent
low and reached out into the darkness and used her fingertips to explore the
grainy surface of the object with which she had collided. After a moment or two
she concluded that she had stumbled upon a heavy leather-bound trunk.
Erika knelt on the cold floor in front of the trunk, and ran her nimble
fingers across its front, hoping to find a catch. Locating it, she fiddled with
it until she heard a faint click. She threw open the trunk and reached inside,
hoping to find an unguent, a salve, a bandage - anything that might help ease
her suffering. But, after running her hands around the interior of the trunk
she found nothing but a cork-stopped bottle lying atop some bits of cloth. She
opened the bottle and held it to her nose, but then quickly turned away,
repulsed by its foul smell.
Suddenly, the incessant hammering on the upper deck fell silent, and
Erika heard a faint rattle-like sound coming from the gloom to her left. She
shivered slightly and peered into the inky blackness, but saw nothing. Erika
rose and took a deep breath in order to steady her nerves and then resolved to
determine the source of the mysterious noise.
She tiptoed to her left, and reached out toward what she expected to be
the wall of the room opposite the cot, but instead found a heavy woolen blanket,
which someone had apparently hung to partition off the room. Trembling, Erika
slid through the opening between the blanket and the wall and inched her aching
body forward, feeling her way down the wall, as the dry, rattling sound grew
louder.
She had only taken another step or two when her knee struck a solid
object. Reaching out and down, she realized that she had bumped into a second
cot, one which bore the reek of sweat and disease. She slid around and eased
herself down onto the corner of the bed, still straining to hear the rhythmic,
rattling sound which seemed closer now than ever.
She rose again, intent on continuing her search, the second cot having
given her new hope of finding something useful in the pitch-black infirmary,
when she felt something hot and clammy brush against her thigh.
Erika recoiled in fear and surprise just as the rattle gave way to the
sound of a cough, a dreadful hacking cough that sent shivers through her body.
"Water!" a choking voice croaked in Chinese, as the feverish hand
tightened on her thigh.
Overcome with revulsion, Erika reached out and pushed the sweaty hand
from her thigh.
"Please ... water," the man gasped again as his body shook convulsively,
as if shaken by the cold hand of death.
Erika stood and turned away, anxious to retreat to the relative safety
of her own cot. But as she did so she remembered Daniel Kauffmann's caring
touch and Ju's gentle voice and healing hands. And she remembered how the two
of them had pulled her away from the twin precipices of madness and death and
patiently nursed her body and mind and spirit back to health.
"Forgive me," Erika whispered as she nervously edged closer to the
figure on the bed. "It is very dark, and for a moment I was afraid." She eased
herself down so that her hip pressed against the man's shoulder and slid her
fingers up his frail arm and then his shirtless torso. She pressed her hand
softly over his heart, but its beat was as faint as the cry of a distant
sea-bird. The man's bony hand fell across hers, holding her hand to his heart,
and this time, moved by the poignant intimacy of his touch, she did not pull
away.
The man on the cot tried once again to mouth the word, 'water' but this
time only a faint croak escaped his cracked lips. Despite the horrors of her
own predicament, Erika's heart went out to the stranger shivering in the
darkness. "I will try," Erika whispered, as she brushed a hand over the man's
brow and down his stubbly cheek. Though she could barely see the outline of his
face, she could feel that his skin was stretched as tightly as parchment over
his protruding cheekbones. She pressed her cool hand against his face gently,
as if somehow her touch could still the fever that consumed him. Then she rose
and stepped back through the gap between the blanket and the wall, and noticed,
for the first time, an almost imperceptible sliver of light coming from a crack
beneath the door through which she had been dragged earlier.
Crossing the room quickly, she snatched the skimpy horsehair blanket
from her cot, wrapped it hastily around her body and knotted it between her
breasts before reaching for the door. She felt for the latch, found it and
pulled at it, knowing in her heart of hearts that it was locked. When the latch
held fast, she pounded on the door with her fist hoping against hope that
someone was in the passageway outside.
"Water! Please! Can we have some water!"
A moment later Erika heard the odd, uneven gait of halting footsteps,
and then the metallic scrape of the latch being pulled through an ancient hasp.
There was a brief pause and then the door opened inward, forcing Erika to step
back.
"What's all the noise, wench?" The unaccustomed brightness of the
lantern the intruder held before his face blinded Erika for a moment. But there
was no mistaking the croaking voice of her jailer. Nor was there any mistaking
the sharpness of the fisherman's knife that the partially-lame sailor named
Froggy held in his free hand.
"Please ... can we have some water. The man over there ... seems to be
very ill."
"Water, eh? What's in it for me, sweetie?" Froggy growled lecherously,
his eyes riveted to the tops of Erika's breasts whose creamy paleness was
emphasized by the darkness of the blanket which only partly covered them.
As she glanced downward following the path of his lascivious glance,
Erika realized for the first time that the blanket wrapped around her body was
in the pattern of a Scottish tartan. She shuddered slightly, sensing the
chilling presence of Captain Angus McMahon in the tiny room. But she quickly
put the provenance of the tartan out of her mind, remembering that it had been
Froggy's powerful hands which had first brought tears to her eyes during the
Third Torment, when the fifteen crewmen had taken turns fondling and groping her
breasts.
Putting her finger to her lips in an attempt to get the brutish sailor
to lower his voice, Erika whispered, "It's not for me. It's for him," she added,
gesturing toward the much larger blanket which divided the room. I think ... I
think he is near death."
"Blackie?" Froggy snorted in a low voice, as he limped closer to the
retreating blonde while another fit of coughing made its way through the
blanket which divided the room. "I don't care if he coughs his lungs out,
sweetie. That bastard started in with me every time I tried to have a little
fun with one of the girls in the 'Cage'." Froggy's eyes never left Erika's
body as he placed the lantern on the floor in the center of the room and
fingered his knife fondly before playfully inserting it into the torso-long gap
in the blanket just below the knot that hugged her breastbone.
Fearful of making a quick movement, Erika could only stand there
trembling while Frogyy slowly wiped the shining blade back and forth across the
inner curves of her breasts as if they were whetstones of woman-flesh. The
predatory gleam in his eyes left Erika little reason to doubt that his idea of
'fun' with his female prisoners would surely have been degrading or painful or
both. "Aye, that useless pile of sea-scum even ratted on me to the Laird once
when he caught me and a couple of the boys breaking in a sweet little Filipina.
How were we to know that a cutie with a body like hers was only fourteen - and a
virgin?"
Ignoring Froggy's bout of self-pity, Erika instead turned her thoughts
to the man the sailor had called Blackie. Despite her hours-long shipboard
ordeal, Erika clearly remembered Slegg bursting into the captain's cabin hours
earlier {Chapter 128}, lamenting the fact that Blackie, the ship's stoker, would
be unable to man his station. It had been his hellish post in the bowels of the
ship that she had filled. The fact that they had shared that drudgery, and that
the stoker had apparently done his best to defend the prisoners of the Yang-tze
Dragon from the depraved attentions of Froggy and his mates strengthened her
bond with him even more.
"Water!" the voice from behind the blanket implored again, before dying
away in another seizure of coughing. Clearly Blackie's raging fever had
weakened him greatly in the hours since he had failed to report for duty.
"Please?" Erika tried again, looking at Froggy beseechingly.
Froggy placed the lantern on the floor at his feet and then plopped his
burly body down onto the edge of her cot, fumbling with his seaman's trousers as
he did so. "If it's water for Blackie you want, you'll have to earn it, Missy,"
he replied with a salacious grin. As Erika tugged awkwardly at the blanket,
trying to close the narrow gap between the two ends, Froggy stared straight
ahead hoping to catch a glimpse of her pale golden fleece, and enjoying the
play of lantern-light on her legs, which the blanket covered only to mid-thigh.
"How about a little private show for Old Froggy?"
"Please ... for God's sake, " Erika whispered passionately. "Can't you
just bring a pitcher of water to a dying man?"
"Why, sure I can, Missy," Froggy smirked. "But they say one good turn
deserves another." His visage darkened. "And you're going to do me ... a good
turn first. That is, you will," he added with brutal finality, "if you want
that pitcher of water for your new friend. And you can start, Missy," he added
with a lecherous leer, "by lifting that blanket. Nice and slow now, for uncle
Froggy!
Erika tried to conceal her fury as she returned the stare of the swarthy
Chinese, who sat so complacently on her cot, each of them knowing that he held
the upper hand. She had no choice but to submit to his obscene pleasures, not
if she wanted to provide comfort to the ailing stoker.
"V-very well," Erika replied nervously, as she bent forward slightly to
take the hem of the blanket between her fingertips, blushingly aware that this
slight inclination of her body exposed even more of her thrusting breasts. She
straightened and began sliding the hem of the tartan up her thighs.
"Closer, Missy. And do it nice and slow," Froggy cautioned her in a
rasping voice, as he opened the drawstring of his trousers and liberated his
swollen cock.
Biting her soft lower lip in shame and embarrassment, Erika edged closer
to the bed. She continued to inch the coarse blanket up her legs, watching with
revulsion as Froggy feasted his eyes on her thigh flesh, fondling the handle of
his knife with one hand and stroking his dark-veined member with the other. When
the hem of the tartan was only an eyelash from her sex, Froggy made a twirling
motion with the hand that brandished the knife. "Let's see that pretty ass!"
Grateful that she would be spared the sight of Froggy's disgusting
self-stroking for a moment, Erika slowly turned around and eased the fabric up
over the gentle slope at the base of her buttocks.
"Higher, wench! But slow. Nice and slow."
Erika continued to inch the blanket higher until it was well past the
midway point of her shapely buttocks, but she suddenly froze when she felt the
cold blade of Froggy's fish-knife sliding down the cleft of her derriere.
"Nice," he rasped, as he pressed the very tip of the knife against
Erika's nether orifice. "Very nice." Then he gave the knife a gentle twist
that send a shudder of terror through Erika's body.
"Now let's see that pretty pussy," he snarled, withdrawing the knife,
but pressing it against Erika's bare right hip and using it as a lever to turn
her body.
Trembling, Erika turned to face her tormentor. He was leaning forward
on the edge of the bed now, his swarthy face only inches from her golden-fringed
sex, caressing his meaty phallus with long smooth strokes.
"Touch yourself!" he whispered, his visage a mask of lust. "Do it!"
But as soon as Erika's fingertips had given the pink perfection of her
vulva a few tentative strokes, Froggy groaned like a rutting boar, and pulled
Erika's body closer, his hungry mouth brushing her dainty fingers aside.
Doing her best to conceal her revulsion, Erika managed to stammer,
"Didn't you hear the captain give orders that you were not to touch me?" She
held her finger to her lips again, indicating that she wanted Froggy to keep his
voice down so that neither the man on the other side of the hanging blanket nor
anyone in the corridor outside could hear them.
"Aye," Froggy obliged in a raspy whisper, as he inhaled the redolent
scent of her womanhood. "But the laird didn't say anything about you not
touching me, now did he?
Froggy chuckled lewdly as he leaned back slightly and fisted his rigid
phallus so that it pointed straight at Erika. "I've been carrying this big fella
around for hours, Missy," he muttered as he rolled his cupped fingers over the
knob of his erection. "Drop the towel, Missy and let's have another look at
those tits!"
Erika hesitated briefly, but when Froggy raised the knife menacingly,
her fingers attacked the knot that held the two ends of the tartan together.
She fumbled with it nervously for a moment or two before undoing it, and then
held the ends of the blanket against her chest, in the vain hope that some
miracle might cause her captor to abandon his carnal course.
But it was not to be. "You know, sweetie -- all during Slegg's show,
I was wondering what it would be like to feel those big sweaty tits sliding up
and down my ..."
Froggy's obscene reminiscence was interrupted by a dreadful fit of
coughing from across the room, followed by another groaning plea for water.
Torn between her stomach-turning disgust for her captor and her
heart-wrenching empathy for the dying stoker, Erika squirmed hesitantly as
Froggy fondled his swollen genitals and gestured for her to come closer. "In
Kowloon, where I come from, everything and everyone has its price, Missy. But
tonight I don't feel like haggling . A nice long tit-fuck for old Froggy in
return for a pitcher of water. "Besides," he gloated, "after all the coins I
threw in those breast-baskets of yours, I've bought and paid for those beauties
twice over!"
When Erika still hesitated, Froggy whispered. "Aw, come on, sweetie,
don't play the innocent virgin with me. Half the men on board have had their
hands on those beauties, and the rest'll see 'em tomorrow. What difference is
giving your jailer's prick a good tit-rubbing going to make? Now get on those
pretty knees, wench - or your friend can suck on the coal dust he's coughing up
for all I care!"
With the baleful sound of Deng's incessant hammering still reverberating
on the deck above, Erika shivered despairingly as she contemplated the
prospects for the morrow. As she considered Froggy's loathsome proposal another
plaintive moan from across the room made up her mind. What did it matter now,
anyway? "How do I know I can trust you?" she asked Froggy as she dropped to her
knees despondently on the tartan alongside the cot.
Froggy widened his thighs beckoningly. "Aww, you can trust old Froggy.
Tell you what. Do a good job, sweetie," Froggy croaked, "and maybe I'll have
that scrawny cook of ours whip up some nice soup for the poor bastard. Who
knows, maybe it'll fix 'im right up."
Erika edged closer, repulsed by everything about this horrid man, but
finding it impossible to turn her back on the last hope for the suffering
stoker.
"That's it, Missy," Froggy muttered softly as he stroked his shaft and
edged forward on the cot until he could feel the of Erika's sweet breath on the
sensitive tip of his cock. "Yeah ... that's a good girl. Snuggle up nice and
close. But rub 'em up for me first. Get those babies nice and hard," he added,
his dark, almond-shaped eyes darting from one tasty-looking nipple to the other.
"Just like Froggy likes 'em."
Her face crimson in the lanternlight, Erika did as she was bid,
caressing her breasts, still tender from all manner of abuse, until her
thrice-bound nipples jutted out pink and bold from the centers of her kissable
areolae.
"Now get to it, Missy. Quick, before somebody comes!"
Froggy did not stop stroking his phallus until he felt the gentle
pressure of Erika's breasts against his upright member. "Ahh, very nice. Now
scoop 'em together in your hands and.....oh, yeah," he groaned pleasurably as he
leaned forward and slid his prick into the deliciously soft, sweaty canyon
formed by Erika's pushed-together breasts.
"Work those tits!" he muttered through clenched teeth, sensing Erika's
lack of enthusiasm for her degrading task. "And work 'em good, you blue-eyed
slut - or that black-lunged son of a whore can choke on his thirst!"
********
As Erika pressed her sweat-sheened breasts against Froggy's meaty
erection she remembered the first time she had been subjected to this form of
abuse. She had only been George Chan's slave-mistress a short time when the
Vice-Lord of the Black Scorpions had invited Ming-tsu to his villa to enjoy an
evening of erotic pleasure with his new sexual plaything. Erika had served the
cruel but handsome couple an elegant repast, her splendid body clad only in a
tiny brassiere of white lace et un petit rien - a little nothing - a pair of
the indecently filmy French panties which George Chan found so provocative.
As the dinner progressed, Ming-tsu, noting the massive erection under
George's billowing robe, grew both envious and amused by George's preoccupation
with Erika's superb breasts, which were almost totally exposed by her
shamelessly low-cut brassiere. As she served the fourth course, George's eyes
had followed Erika's every movement. Grinning wickedly, Ming-tsu reached inside
his robe and caressed his manhood lovingly, stroking it from root to glans.
Measuring his excitement, the beautiful concubine had wagered him a quarter-hour
of analinguis that Erika could bring her excited master to climax using only her
breasts. Her breasts, Ming-tsu stipulated, and the cascade of shoulder-length
blonde hair that George had caressed so lovingly when he had forced her to
pleasure him with her mouth on the night of her arrival at his villa.
George had snapped up the bet with alacrity, and a few moments later he
was stretched out on a broad divan, naked, his erection pulsing with desire.
Her mini-brassiere and panties discarded, Erika knelt above him and began to
make love to him, using only her breasts and her hair. Whenever her efforts
slackened, Ming-tsu was quick to slash her bare backside with a ladylike, but
fierce-biting leather dog-leash.
Ming-tsu had interspersed stinging cracks with the leash with whispered
words of coaching that showed the attention to detail that only a virtuosa of
the erotic arts could have possessed. At which speed and at which angles Erika
should sweep her flowing tresses and her pendulous breasts along George's legs;
how much pressure to exert when she raked her bullet-hard nipples gently across
his quivering thigh-muscles, or bored them more firmly into his broad, hairless
chest. And finally, after a considerable amount of preliminary teasing and
tantalizing, how to envelop his sturdy cockstaff between her breasts so that she
could slide her soft globes forward and backward against his swollen erection in
order to excite her jaded master to the very pinnacle of pleasure.
Remarkably, George Chan's iron will (or more likely his fervent craving
to be the receiver, and not the giver of the depraved caress which was at stake
in his depraved wager with Ming-tsu) enabled him to withhold an orgasm for the
stipulated thirty minutes. Disappointed by losing the wager, Ming-tsu had
fulfilled the terms of her wager by servicing the Lord of the Scorpions with her
skillful tongue. But she had done so only after positioning her kneeling body
above a recumbent Erika Weiss, so that the German beauty could lick her
glistening clitoris while she snaked her own tongue daintily into the forbidden
orifice between Chan's widespread buttocks.
And even the sensuous oral caresses of that etreinte de trois were put
off until Ming-tsu had directed Erika to present her naked breasts - whose
negligence had caused the lovely Chinese concubine to lose her bet - for
punishment. Six searing, stinging slashes with the dog leash across the tops of
her superb breasts were Erika's introduction to the art of breast-discipline, a
subject whose fine points her masterful mentors took great pains to instill in
her during the arduous months which followed.
********
But Froggy possessed no greater fraction of George Chan's sexual
self-control than he did of his wealth and power. Erika, anxious to bring their
debasing encounter to a swift conclusion, had skipped the delicious
preliminaries she had learned at the tip of Ming-tsu's leather leash. Kneeling
submissively at Froggy's feet she guided the seated crewman's penis skillfully,
so that one moment his pulsing cock was fighting its way upward through the
delicious friction afforded by her sweaty love-globes, and then shifting
position slightly so that his every hip-thrust drove Froggy's prick forward,
forcing its way between her magnificent melons by way of a frontal assault, so
that his glans thudded against her breastbone at the end of each virile stroke.
"Oh, yeahhhh..." Froggy grunted softly, as he wriggled in animalistic
pleasure, meeting Erika's sensuous gyrations with rhythmic, rocking lunges. "By
the gods of Genghis Khan that feels good. Work those tits, blondie! ! Squeeze
'em tighter, you blue-eyed, big-titted whore!"
Just then Erika felt the sharp edge of Froggie's blade, which she had
all but forgotten, knifing between the slightly spread fingers which cupped her
breasts. A moment later it had found its way, by some dark, unerring instinct,
to the edge of one of the gashes in her left breast that Mao had inflicted with
the screwdriver.
"I said, 'Tighter', wench!" Froggy croaked, twisting the tip of the
knife briefly against the laceration, enforcing her compliance with his
depraved desires. Grimacing with pain, Erika pressed her stiff-nippled mounds
even tighter around Froggy's meaty member.
"Yeaahhh, that's it! Come on, come on!" he rasped excitedly, his
passion mounting. Erika, hoping to satisfy him quickly, began to move her upper
body even faster, complementing the inward pressure of her breast-flesh,
wrapping her sweaty lust-gourds ever tighter around Froggy's manhood.
"Yaah! Yaahh!" Froggy grunted ecstatically a moment later as he pumped
rope after rope of creamy sperm onto Erika's naked breasts. He fell back on the
cot and lay there, sated and somnolent for some seconds, until Erika, slowly
rising from the abyss of humiliation, reminded him of his promise to bring water
to her fellow inmate.
"All right, all right, don't rush me!" Froggy growled, leaning forward
and crudely wiping his cock on the pebbly aureole of Erika's right breast.
*********
But he was as good as his word and a few minutes later Erika was perched
on the edge of Blackie's cot, pulling a blanket tighter around the sweating,
shivering man and then pouring water from the flagon Froggy had brought into a
wooden cup whose handle looked to have been broken off long before she had ever
set foot in China.
"Thank you, thank you," the haggard Chinese rasped in a hollow voice, as
his trembling hand tried to guide the cup to his lips.
"Here, let me help you," Erika whispered, as she helped him to drink
from the cup."
"Who ... who are you?" Blackie gasped, gaping with half-seeing eyes at
the blonde vision illumined by the lantern Froggy had left. But there was no
lust in the dying man's eyes; only wonder that a golden-haired angel should
appear at his deathbed.
"I hardly know, anymore." Erika answered in the same rudimentary Chinese
with which she had spoken to Froggy. As she bathed Blackie's face with the
water she was dying to taste herself, she added, "I know only that we are
companions in misfortune." She stroked his hand, rough and callused from years
of shoveling, "and perhaps soon in death."
Blackie nodded and lay still for a few moments, still shivering, but the
water seemed to have restored a bit of his strength. "I am not afraid of
death," he began, but his voice cracked, and Erika could see tears in his eyes.
"It will be easier, perhaps," Erika whispered, "if we face it together."
Blackie's gaunt face and dark, hollow eyes seemed haunted by an unknown
spirit. "There is evil on this ship, great evil. But do not fear death; you
are young and beautiful. They will not let you die."
Erika shivered inside but gave the stoker's hand a brave squeeze. "I
would prefer to die than to live as a slave to men such as these."
"Only the gods know the hour of our death; we dare not alter their
design."
"How ... how did you come to this place?"
"Fate knows nothing of right and wrong; it knows only that what must be,
must be. I have offended the gods, and they are punishing me now. But you have
been sent to me at the moment of my death. This too is fate."
"But ... but, why?" Erika stammered.
"To hear my story."
