Bridled Hollow
Copyright© 2025 by BareLin
Chapter 1: A Past Carved by the System
My name is Lyra Vale. It sounds like graffiti scrawled beneath a chipped sink in a bus station bathroom—something jagged and temporary, etched under a bad poem about lost love. Still, it’s mine. The only thing I’ve ever owned outright. A tether to a life that feels less like a coherent story and more like a box of shattered glass, each shard a moment too sharp and fragile to hold for long before it, too, dissolves into nascent disappointment.
My mother was a phantom limb. A ghost trailing cheap jasmine perfume and menthol smoke. Her final act of motherhood wasn’t a lullaby or a kiss; it was leaving me jammed between a groaning zombie shooter and a skee-ball lane in “Pixel Paradise,” a strip-mall arcade reeking of sweat and fried dough. I remember the pixelated blood splatter on the screen, the gun’s plastic trigger sticky beneath my small fingers. One moment, her shadow stretched long and thin over the flashing lights—a familiar silhouette against the chaos. Next, it dissolved into the crowd like sugar in cheap coffee. I didn’t cry. I just stared at the spot where she’d been, the cold metal token digging into my palm, unspent and useless.
The aftermath was cold and fluorescent. Police station lights buzzed like angry wasps, bleaching the color out of everything. A social worker, smelling faintly of peppermint and exhaustion, draped a coarse wool blanket over my shoulders—scratchy like a thousand spider legs, reeking of dust and disinfectant. It was too heavy. An anchor dragging on my young frame. That day carved the first gouge into me. Not an ending, but an initiation. The system’s gears had snagged me. I was raw material for its relentless grinding.
What followed was a parade of temporary states. Sterile offices with flickering fluorescents humming dirges. Foster homes that smelled of ammonia and false promises, their surfaces gleaming with a brittle welcome. I became an archaeologist of resentment, digging for truth beneath foster parents’ saccharine smiles. Their eyes always betrayed them—a flicker of irritation when I asked for seconds, a tightened jaw when my laugh scraped too loud against the manufactured quiet.
My entire existence fits into a single reusable grocery bag, its cheerful turquoise letters screaming HOPE! Like a cruel, cosmic joke. I carried it until the handles frayed into rough strings, my hands perpetually white-knuckled. Ready to run. Always braced for the inevitable sigh, the rehearsed speech: “We’ve decided you’d be better elsewhere...”
The lesson etched itself into my marrow: I was disposable, a problem to be managed, filed, and forwarded. I mastered invisibility—swallowing words, stifling coughs, and learning each household’s unspoken rules like a spy behind enemy lines. Just as roots dared to form—school, friendships—the ground shifted. Off to another sinkhole. Another place to lay my head. If I were quiet enough, small enough, maybe they’d forget to throw me away.
By twelve, hope was a dead language, its grammar forgotten. Group homes replaced foster care’s fragile lies with brutal honesty. Cement walls echoed. Shared showers offered no privacy. The air was thick with the constant low hum of communal desperation. I built walls inside myself—thick, soundproof things layered with scar tissue. Those walls made it difficult. Uncooperative. That meant more shuffling. More blurred faces and names dissolving into the gray procession of my life.
By sixteen, freedom was a metallic tang on my tongue—sharp and close. The system was finally done with me. I pictured it spitting me out onto hot pavement. Finally, blessedly forgotten.
Then the hunger came. Not the familiar gurgle of an empty stomach, but a void—gnawing, relentless, scraping my thoughts raw. My latest placement was a fortress of lack: a padlocked pantry like a medieval dungeon, a fridge humming with hollow emptiness. Nothing here is yours, gutter rat. The silent accusation hung in the stale air.
After two days licking crumbs from torn cracker sleeves and gulping rusty tap water that tasted of pennies and despair, reason dissolved. Only instinct remained—primal and screaming: Fill the hole. Survive.
I stole a peach first. Its downy skin yielded under my thumb, warm from the display lights, juice bursting like stolen sunlight on my tongue, achingly sweet. Then a granola bar—oats and honey clinging to my teeth like a fleeting promise. A root beer so cold it burned my throat with fizzy rebellion. Barely a crime, I told myself. The justification is as thin as rice paper. A tax paid by a world that owed me everything and gave me dust.
The clerk’s hand clamped my wrist—cold, hard, finally. Fluorescent lights froze the world into a sick tableau: the garish candy rack, the shocked face of the pimpled teen behind the counter, the peach pit still warm in my other hand. I didn’t fight. Didn’t plead. Just stood there, hollowed out, while he hauled me back like spoiled meat.
They didn’t call the cops. That tiny spark—maybe this time—died instantly, snuffed out before it could flicker.
They are called Johnna. The social worker. The one who should have been a safety net, but whose file on me was likely stamped Problematic. Expendable.
Her sigh when she arrived was my autobiography compressed into sound. A weary exhale that smelled of stale coffee, budget perfume, and resignation. Her polyester blazer sagged under the weight of too many girls like me, its shoulders permanently dented. She paid the clerk with crumpled bills from an envelope thin with despair.
“The Specialized Program, Lyra,” she said, her voice flat, steering me toward her dented sedan with a hand on my elbow that felt less like guidance and more like delivery.
The car’s interior reeked of ancient fast food wrappers, spilled soda, and lost causes. Her knuckles whitened on the wheel as she begged someone on the phone, her voice cracking like dry earth.
“Please, just one more chance? She’s sixteen, she’s...” Silence answered, thick and final. When she turned to me, her eyes were river stones worn smooth by endless currents. Impenetrable. Cold. Devoid of light or warmth.
“Alternative rehabilitation. Behavioral recalibration.” She paused, the words dropping like stones dropped into a well. “A specialized program for girls like you.”
Girls like you. The words slithered over my skin like grease, leaving a psychic residue. What did that mean? Thieves? Runaways? Broken things beyond the cost-effective reach of glue? My bones vibrated with the primal urge to flee. To smash the window and vanish into the blurring highway. The landscape outside streaked into a nauseating smear of green and gray.
The van was unmarked. Industrial. A steel beast built for hauling crates, livestock, or inconvenient cargo. The driver’s face was carved granite—jagged planes and eyes like glacial fissures reflecting nothing. She wrenched the back door open, and the darkness inside exhaled a metal gullet lined with three pale, utterly exposed, trembling shapes, their eyes wide with shared terror in the weak light.
Her voice was a serrated blade dragged across bone, stripping away the pretense of humanity.
“Strip, now you’ll stay that way.” Not a command. An unraveling. A dissolution.
My breath locked in my throat. Ice flooding my veins. The cold air gnawed at my exposed skin, but infinitely worse was the hollowing terror. Lyra Vale peeled away—left in a pathetic heap of faded denim and thin cotton on the filthy asphalt, like shed snakeskin. My identity was discarded.
Johnna watched—a silent, slumped statue. As I shook free of my jeans, my frayed shirt, the last pathetic armor of my old life, she gathered them like a biohazard technician. One brutal swing of her arm, and they vanished into the dumpster’s rusted maw. My name. My past. The stolen peach pit I’d tucked in my pocket yesterday—a stupid, hopeful talisman—all landfill now. Erased.
Then the transaction: a manila folder thick with lies and bureaucratic absolution exchanged for a brick of cash pressed into the granite woman’s waiting palm. A receipt for a deleted life. Payment rendered.
The dumpster lid screamed shut, the sound final and metallic.
The van door slammed, sealing us in a tomb on wheels. Darkness swallowed us whole—thick and suffocating—broken only by the occasional sickly yellow sliver of light that stabbed through the shifting gaps around the wired cage separating us from the driver’s cab. Each lurch of the vehicle sent a metallic groan through the chassis, vibrating up through the cold, ribbed metal floor into our bare bones.
The air was a physical assault. Rank. The stench of unwashed bodies, sour fear-sweat, and something else—the sharp, ammoniac tang of urine and the cloying scent of dried mud—clung to the back of the throat, making each inhale a gagging struggle. Filth coated the very air we breathed, gritty on the tongue.
In the oppressive gloom, the other three girls materialized like ghosts—pale smudges against dark metal. I must have looked the same to them: a hollow-eyed specter, skin prickling with cold and terror. Stripped bare, shivering violently, we had been reduced to raw, interchangeable blanks. Any distinguishing marks, any semblance of identity, had been scraped away with our clothes.
One girl was caked in dried, flaking mud from hairline to feet, as if she’d been dredged from a ditch moments before being thrown in here. The mud wasn’t just dirt—it was a second skin of violation, revealing raw, abraded flesh beneath where it had cracked and fallen away. Another huddled into herself, rocking back and forth with a low, continuous whimper that was more vibration than sound.
The small one in the far corner had a weathered face, curled into a tight ball. She trembled like a sparrow caught in a hurricane. Her wide, unblinking eyes reflected nothing but pure, animal panic. Between her teeth, she gnawed the cuff of an imaginary sleeve—biting with desperate, rhythmic intensity. It was the only solid thing left in her dissolving world, a frayed tether to a sanity that was rapidly unraveling.
The silence wasn’t just an absence of sound; it was a crushing, physical weight. It pressed down, squeezing the air from my lungs, thick with the unspoken terrors coiling inside each of us and the pungent, metallic reek of collective fear-sweat. The only sounds were the van’s protesting groan, the frantic scratch of teeth on fabric, the wet, ragged breathing of the weeping girl, and the hammering of my own heart against my ribs—a trapped bird beating its cage of bone.
We didn’t look at each other. Eye contact felt like a dangerous spark in this tinderbox of despair. We were islands of raw nerve endings adrift in a sea of cold metal and encroaching madness, waiting for the grinding wheels to deliver us to whatever fresh hell lay at the end of this dark road.
Oblivion wasn’t a release anymore. It was the only destination promised. The van was its cold, relentless chariot. Lyra Vale was already miles behind, buried in a dumpster. Whatever rattled forward in this metal gullet wasn’t a girl. It was fear. It was a hollow space waiting to be filled by whatever our destination deemed necessary.
Following the violent shake of the metal cage that thrust us out of a deep pothole, I shattered the oppressive quiet. “Anyone got a clue where this clown car is headed?” My voice cracked like a dropped plate—too loud, too sharp in the confined space.
The girl nearest me, barely visible in the dim light—cornrows framing a fading purple shiner around one eye—flicked a glance my way filled with weary caution before fixing her gaze resolutely on the van’s filthy, ribbed metal floor. Nothing. The youngest, knees drawn tight to her chest as if trying to vanish, shrank further, burying her face. The tall one near the front, defiance etched into sharp cheekbones and rigid shoulders, just snorted—a sound like gravel spitting from under a tire.
“Don’t matter,” she said, her voice flat and worn as old asphalt. “A place like this? Isn’t anyone coming back out?”
She stared straight ahead at the partition separating us from the driver, her eyes dead pools reflecting nothing but the cold certainty of a verdict carved in stone.
I bit back the acid, questions rising like bile: Where? Why? What do they want? Whatever hellmouth we approached, it hadn’t swallowed me whole yet. Not while I could still taste the coppery tang of my fear—sharp and vital.
The van lurched violently, spitting gravel against the undercarriage like a stream of curses as the metal sliding door opened. Light flooded through the windshield glare. Air seeped through the vents—cooler, damper, thick with the sweet, cloying rot of decaying pine needles and the rich, loamy scent of wet earth. Beneath it, coiling like a serpent, lay a sharp, unmistakable coppery tang. Blood on the wind.
We slowed, tires crunching rhythmically over gravel. Through a sliver of a heavily tinted window, I saw it: wrought iron gates towering like the maw of a colossal beast. Bridled Hollow Estate. The bars weren’t twisted into elegant vines, but into cruel, unmistakable reins and knotted whips—tools of control rendered in cold, unforgiving iron. My gut knotted violently, bile burning my throat. A horse farm? Some rich bastard’s depraved playground? The realization hit like a physical blow.
No. This is something else. Something peeled back to the raw, screaming nerve.
The gate yawned wide, swallowing the van whole. A manicured hell unfolded—hedges trimmed with razor precision into impenetrable walls, fences too white and too clean, gravel paths snaking toward woods that loomed ancient and ominous, swallowing the light.
Then I saw the procession.
Six naked females—hardly fourteen to my sixteen, face bare masks of terrifying blankness. Each wore a harness of thick, black leather, straps digging into shoulders and cinching waists unnaturally tight. Gleaming silver bits were clenched between their teeth, drool slicking their chins. Arms locked rigidly behind their backs in arm binders. Feet forced into black, polished hoof boots, lifting their heels unnaturally high, forcing a painful, arched posture.
Obscene, straight, flowing tails swung from harnesses attached to thick plugs at the base of their spines. They were hitched in a line, two by two, three rows deep, straining against chains connecting their harnesses to heavy metal bars attached to an ornate cart piled with hay bales. Lounging atop it, a man sipped amber liquid from a crystal glass, a coiled bullwhip resting casually across his lap, utterly at ease.
They moved with terrifying, synchronized precision. No shame. No rebellion. Just absolute obedience carved into flesh and bone.