Chapter 2: Where Wild Things Are Broken

Dawn was a traitor. A thin, grey blade of light under the stall door, promising a world that felt galaxies away. I pressed my forehead against the cold, resilient foam padding, refraining from screaming, from pounding the walls, from dissolving entirely within this fucking hellhole of a bound archer’s chamber. It wasn’t just a stall—it was a sarcophagus lined in leather and shame. A wonder, truly, how any semblance of sleep had found me in the suffocating quiet punctuated by distant horrors?

Every bone screamed a litany of fresh agony. The harness straps were living things, biting into flesh already raw from hours of immobility. The tail plug remained a violating anchor, a constant, humiliating intrusion that scraped the edge of pain with every slight shift. The bit strap was a maddening brand behind my ears, the source of an itch I could never scratch, a fire I couldn’t quench, a persistent reminder of my helplessness.

If the physical torment wasn’t enough, the chamber itself never slept. The relative quiet of my confinement was perpetually shattered. Fresh intakes arrived like clockwork in the dead of night. The sounds weren’t just whimpers—they were the raw, guttural soundtrack of resistance being systematically crushed. Choked-off sobs dissolved into wet, ragged gasps for air, abruptly silenced. A muffled cry always followed the sharp, sickening thwack of leather meeting unresisting flesh, cut short, leaving behind a vacuum of dread more profound than the noise. Underpinning it all, a constant, terrifying counterpoint: the rhythmic, purposeful tromp-tromp-tromp of heavy boots on the concrete aisle outside. Firm. Unhurried. Inevitable. Hunting.

Suddenly, the thin line of light vanished, plunging me into utter darkness. My breath hitched. Not footsteps. Not yet. The heavy bolt on the stall door shot back with a sound like a gunshot—impossibly loud in the suffocating quiet. My heart slammed against my ribs, a frantic bird caged in leather and pure, animal dread. I wasn’t ready.

I was caught mid-stride, grotesquely unbalanced in the stiff, degrading hoof boots. The desperate pressure in my bladder had finally overridden the crushing humiliation of using the hay-slab in the corner. I’d been trying to reach it—a clumsy, humiliating pilgrimage. Now I froze, one hoof boot half-raised, muscles locked in a trembling, precarious stance, bound hands uselessly clasped before me like a broken doll’s. The scalding wave of humiliation was instantaneous, hotter than any physical pain.

She filled the doorway. Not just physically—though her presence was undeniably powerful, broad shoulders beneath the dark riding jacket—but with an aura of contained force that choked the air. This was the architect of my torment. The personification of Bridled Hollow’s seamless, terrifying image:

Madam Sorrell.

She defied expectation. Not the leather-clad gargoyle of nightmares, but young, striking, unnervingly beautiful. Sharp cheekbones caught the dim aisle light, framing eyes the unsettling grey of gathering storm clouds. Fiery red hair was braided tight as a ship’s rope, severe against her alabaster skin, emphasizing the stark, almost cruel lines of her features.

Her attire was a perversion of elegance. A fitted dark riding jacket covered her arms and shoulders, stopping just below her collarbones. Beneath it, the rest of her body was encased in a harness identical to mine. The gleaming bit clenched between her teeth. The tail emerging from the base of her spine, the polished hoof boots were fully, deliberately exposed.

Authority radiated not just from the coiled bullwhip at her hip but from the slender, polished dressage crop held loosely in her gloved hand. Her storm-grey eyes scanned the brass number plaque on my stall door—47—then fixed on me, pinning me in my awkward, vulnerable disgrace.

Her voice, when it came, was crisp, clear despite the bit, and colder than the concrete floor. “Filly Bria.”

The wrong name struck like a physical blow to the solar plexus. A deliberate erasure. Lyra. My name is Lyra Vale.

The silent scream tore through my skull—a feral thing battering against the cage of the bit, desperate to shred itself free. My tongue was a swollen, useless lump of meat pressed against cold, unforgiving metal. Only a strained, muffled grunt escaped, swallowed by the oppressive air.

She tapped the crop once, decisively, against her gloved palm. The sound was small. Final. A period at the end of my identity. “Step forward.”

My legs, already trembling from holding the awkward position near the hay-slab, felt like waterlogged timber—leaden and utterly unresponsive. I pushed up, muscles screaming in protest against the unnatural posture forced by the hoof boots and bound arms.

My center of gravity betrayed me. With my hands bound in front, offering no counterbalance, I pitched violently sideways. My shoulder slammed into the resilient foam padding lining the wall. A choked, involuntary sound escaped—muffled grotesquely by the bit—a humiliating parody of a cry.

Her lips twitched. Not a smile. A flicker of cold, clinical assessment, like a biologist noting an expected reaction in a specimen. “Ah.”

Amusement, thin and cruel as a razor blade, laced her tone. It was infinitely worse than anger. It was the sound of ownership confirmed—of possession amused by its property’s inherent clumsiness. “You haven’t learned to walk yet.”

Her storm-cloud gaze flickered downward in a dismissive glance at my awkward stance near the hay-slab. The desperate tension in my thighs is unmistakable. Holding no kindness—only a brutal practicality—she commanded, “Wild, untamed Filly Bria. Let it go as you move.” Casual. Brutal. An order to abandon myself while stumbling towards her like a broken marionette.

A subtle gesture. Barely a flicker of her crop-holding fingers. The Handler materialized from the shadows behind her like a summoned specter, his black-muzzled face impassive beneath the leather hood. His hands moved with impersonal, efficient precision. He unbuckled my wrist cuffs and refastened them in front, linked now by a short, cold chain to a heavy D-ring at the front of my waist harness. My hands were locked into a permanently useless, clasped position—a mockery of prayer.

Then came the leash. Thick, dark leather, smelling of oil and age. He clipped one end to the ring on my collar, the other to a gleaming brass ring embedded in the palm of Sorrell’s riding glove. The connection was immediate, humiliating, and absolute. A physical tether to my jailer. My trainer. My tormentor.

She turned. The leash snapped taut instantly, jerking harshly on the leather collar, pulling me off-balance. I stumbled after her, lurching like a newborn foal on ice. The hoof boots forced my weight onto the balls of my feet, heels unnaturally high, toes pinched and protesting within their rigid confines. Every step became a desperate battle against gravity—a fight for balance I kept losing. I veered sharply left, shoulder scraping painfully against the rough wood of the stall’s doorframe.

A sharp, corrective yank on the leash jolted my entire frame, snapping my head forward and wrenching my jaw tight around the bit. Pain shot through the base of my skull. I staggered, my throat clenched reflexively as if I’d been yanked by a noose. Tears, hot and stinging, welled in my eyes.

“Balance, filly,” Sorrell murmured without turning her head, her voice calm, instructive, devoid of the slightest concern. As if commenting on the quality of the light.

I gritted my teeth. The metal clacked against my teeth, the taste of fear and impotent rage blooming coppery in my mouth.

Survive first. Walk. Just fucking walk.

The phantom pressure in my bladder was a secondary agony—drowned by the immediate, all-consuming struggle to stay upright and draw breath.

We passed other stalls. Open doors offered chilling glimpses into the heart of the Hollow’s purpose. Girls in identical harnesses knelt unnaturally still on thin mats—stone effigies carved from despair. Their heads were held rigidly high on command, eyes fixed on some invisible point straight ahead. Seeing nothing. Reflecting nothing.

Silent attendants in pale blue scrubs moved among them like ghosts, wielding stiff brushes. They methodically groomed flanks, backs, shorn scalps that gleamed dully under the harsh lights. Utter silence. Always silent. Only the scrape of bristles against skin, the soft clink of a buckle adjusting, the faint rustle of scrubs. A tableau of perfected, soul-dead submission.