Chapter 3 Seasons of Submission

Time didn’t flow in Bridled Hollow; it congealed. It thickened into routines measured not in hours or days, but in the sharp, anticipatory silence before the crack of a crop, the jarring, soul-scraping jangle of the morning bell that shattered uneasy sleep into shards of dread, and the impersonal, abrasive scrape of the grooming brush against my shorn scalp and perpetually raw skin. It was counted in the soul-crushing repetition of drills designed not merely to build muscle memory, but to pulverize spirit—to overwrite the neural pathways of self with the cold circuitry of obedience. Calendars dissolved into irrelevance. The sun and moon beyond the high fences and encircling, judgmental mirrors were distant, impotent myths, their cycles meaningless against the grinding, unchanging reality within these walls. Seasons didn’t change; they blurred into a single, suffocating haze—a relentless atmospheric oppression.

The air itself was an instrument of control. It shifted from a knife-edge cold that stole breath and turned the paddock mud to unforgiving iron beneath our cursed hooves, to a damp, clinging chill that seeped into marrow and whispered promises of endless, bone-aching rain. Then, after an eternity measured in shivers and flinches, it morphed into a deceptive, humid warmth that made the leather harnesses chafe relentlessly, raising angry welts, while sweat pooled in the hollows of collarbones and stung my eyes like cheap acid. Months, perhaps years, bled into this suffocating non-time, marked only by the gradual, oppressive shift from the stuffy, breath-stealing humidity to the bone-chilling coldness that attached itself like a second skin to every inch not bound down by the rigging hell of the harness. How long? I didn’t know. Couldn’t know. The only metric was the changing faces.

New faces arrived with brutal regularity through the frosted, impersonal Intake doors—wide-eyed, trembling, radiating the raw, animal terror I remembered like a phantom limb. They arrived and swiftly, efficiently, the terror was schooled into a terrifying blankness, a vacancy behind the eyes. They rarely stayed. As quickly as they materialized—ghosts in borrowed flesh—most vanished like smoke dispersed by a careless wind. Their absences were noted only in the low, furtive whispers exchanged during latrine duty, the muffled altercations overheard when handlers argued over assignments outside the stall doors, or more accurately, the barred cell doors during the interlocking routines, the shuffling of the remaining condemned in this gilded estate. We were the temporary fixtures, interchangeable parts in their monstrous machine; the disappearances were the chilling constant, the rhythm of the Hollow’s dark heart.

I watched them come. Saw the flicker of defiance—a spark quickly extinguished under a trainer’s crop or crushed by the looming, implacable shadow of a Handler. I watched them break: sometimes into silent, trembling wrecks who flinched at their own shadow, sometimes into vacant shells who moved only when commanded, and sometimes they simply ceased to be—one day, present, a trembling statue in the feed stall; the next, a space filled only by dread. The message was brutal, unspoken, but chillingly clear, etched in every vanished girl: You are nothing. Disposable trash. Easily replaced. Forgotten before the echo of your footsteps faded. Each vanishing was a fresh gouge in my psyche, a visceral, gut-punch reminder of the terrifying precariousness of my tenuous hold on existence. Survival demanded more than mere endurance of pain and humiliation; it demanded hyper-vigilance—a constant, exhausting scanning of the environment for threats and the tiniest slivers of opportunity, like a starving animal searching for scraps.

In this suffocating non-time, observation became my lifeline, my only weapon, my desperate map through the labyrinth of torment. Not just seeing, but watching. Watching the handlers’ predictable patterns: the slight, almost imperceptible tensing of a shoulder muscle milliseconds before the prod sparked against flesh, the specific tilt of a head that signaled a punishing change in drill sequence. Watching Madam Sorrell’s storm-gray eyes for the merest flicker of approval—vanishingly rare, like desert rain—or warning—a constant, low hum beneath her gazea—learning to read the subtle shifts in her posture: a straightened spine meaning heightened, predatory scrutiny, a relaxed, almost lazy tap of the crop against her thigh perhaps signaling a momentary, deceptive reprieve.

This was a language as vital as air, a codex written in micro-expressions and tension. Watching the other girls revealed the tell-tale flinches, the subtle tremors they couldn’t suppress, the way defiance died in some eyes like guttering candles starved of oxygen, while in others a different, colder kind of fire smoldered—banked deep beneath layers of learned submission, waiting for fuel. I learned who crumpled inwardly when Madam Sorrell passed, shoulders hunching instinctively as if seeking invisibility, and who, against all reason and survival instinct, dared the barest flicker of an upward glance—a silent challenge etched in the defiant micro-movement of an eyelid or the minute tightening of jaw muscles beneath the bit. This is how I first truly saw Nelda.

She moved through the Hollow like a ghost woven from moonlight and silence. While others winced audibly at the bite of the ill-fitting hoof boots on uneven ground or stifled whimpers when the tail harness shifted jarringly during a drill, sending jolts of violation up the spine, Nelda endured with a terrifying, absolute stillness.

Her obedience wasn’t the sullen resignation of the broken, nor the frantic eagerness of those seeking fleeting favor. It was elegant, detached, almost serene. Her body performed the grotesque, dehumanizing steps with flawless, mechanical precision while her spirit—her essential self—hovered somewhere far beyond the mirrored walls, untouched, observing.

She seemed carved from fragile glass—beautiful in an ethereal, unsettling way, unnervingly transparent in her compliance, and terrifyingly breakable. Yet, paradoxically, the loudest thing about her was her eyes.

Gray-green pools, wide and watchful, held a depth of quiet intelligence and sharp, unnerving curiosity that felt utterly alien in this place of enforced vacancy, a place designed to extinguish thought. Unlike the rest of us, drilled relentlessly to lower our gaze to the dirt or the handlers’ scuffed boots, Nelda looked.

She absorbed the handlers’ movements with unnerving focus, studied the very architecture of our prison—the joins in the mirrors where sightlines might falter, the weak spots in the high fence wiring, the predictable patterns of patrol—and noted the shifting, treacherous dynamics between the girls with the cold acuity of a strategist assessing pieces on a board.

She looked at me, not with the pity of shared misery or the reflexive fear of proximity, but with a quiet, unnerving intensity. It spoke of a silent memory, a world that existed before the leather and the bit, before the shorn scalp and the nameless void. A world where names weren’t stripped away like old paint. Where you owned yourself.

Our connection sparked not in open defiance, but in the banal, soul-crushing horror of the feed stall. A padded, sterile room smelling faintly of cheap antiseptic and the deeper, cloying scent of despair.

Here, we knelt before shallow metal bowls filled with lukewarm, nutrient-rich paste that tasted of chalk and absolute surrender. The ultimate, deliberate degradation: we were forbidden to use our hands. We had to lower our heads, bit and all, and lap at it like animals denied even the dignity of opposable thumbs.

Humiliation served cold, twice daily—a ritual designed to eradicate the last vestiges of human autonomy. I knelt beside Nelda one frigid morning, my jaw aching, struggling to keep the thick, gluey paste from clogging the bit, my gag reflex was a constant, humiliating battle against the violation, my bound hands twitching uselessly at my waist like vestigial limbs. Frustration and impotent rage burned hot behind my eyes, threatening tears of pure, degrading fury that I refused to shed.

Then, a tiny movement. Barely a breath. Nelda, without shifting her gaze a millimeter from her bowl, subtly nudged hers an inch closer to me with a precise, almost invisible tilt of her chin. A microscopic gesture, lost in the shuffle of other heads dipping and lifting, invisible to the handler watching with bored, incurious eyes from the doorway.

To me, drowning in the suffocating isolation of my degradation, it felt seismic. It wasn’t about the meager extra mouthful of paste; it was a message, etched in the cold metal rim: You are not alone. I see you.

That night, long after the stable sounds had settled into the oppressive, watchful quiet— punctuated only by muffled sobs and the distant, ever-present jingle of a handler’s keys, the soundtrack of our captivity—the softest scrape came at my stall door.