Anthony's Monologue

"There was a time, in a not very distant past, when people died like flies. The country was at war, a civil war. Servants and Lords, highborn and forgotten children, maids and ladies... People from every rank of our broken society just kept dying. Of course, most people survived. But there were many who did not see daylight again.

Still, about the survivors... A lot of them lost some limbs to the explosions. Nowadays, is not hard to find people with iron arms or legs, or devices to keep bomb fragments away from vital organs. Yet, that's never a pretty sight. We lost more people for infection than for bullets. In a world where medicinal herbs were rare and more expensive than jewlery, the life of almost every amputee had its days counted down.

Most women who suffered from this kind of injure commited suicide. The strong ones who decide to keep living were forced to hide their iron arms, dealing with them with a certain clumsiness and never being allowed to embrace the protesis thing properly, as the man were free do to as they pleased. The iron legs were easier to hide... But it was a tough life anyway.

And that was rather convenient to Erian.

She lost a hand, but it wasn't for an explosion. The girl was dueling with someone, in a pillage we did a long time ago, and one man cut off her hand. She payed him back cutting his throat open and ripping off his tongue with the hand she had left. It was quite an achievement, and only then our men truly started to respect her. When we finally got her an iron hand, she did the attachment herself. And the infection started to crawl her arm, until one day she came out of her chambers with a new iron hand; this time, it had part of a forearm as well. She asked my help to keep the blood from flowing out of her arm. At first, I did not knew what she meant.

But soon enough she made a tourniquet, and horror came to me when I realized that she was just about to cut the infection out, to keep her alive for as long as she could rip off pieces of her rotting arm. She did the cutting herself... She did EVERYTHING herself. Once again I saw horrifying attachment being done... And that was it.

I found out that she would have to do that every five years. We had enough resources to slow down the infection, at the very least. Not only she managed to stay alive, but she also used that iron arm as a second weapon. And that was how she became famous. 'The woman with the iron claws'. She even added some emerald fingernails to that thing later.

Now that became dangerous. But the convenient part of living in a society where a civil war happened, is that she is not alone on the iron arm thing. And a very good consequence of that is a very simple detail that will allow her to sucessfully play her new role as a modest and invisible housewife: all women these days wear gloves. All the time."

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DISCLAIMER: Não é bem um conto. É um monologo que faz parte da narração da história de Erian, minha protagonista, para um projeto futuro, que pode virar livro ou graphic novel (ainda não sei). Mas achei válido postar aqui anyway o/ como boas vindas às novas marés da vida.