The Gilded Ones

No matter my origins, there is worth in what I am.

The physical body—it heals. The scars fade. But the memories are forever. Even when you forget, they remain inside, taunting you, resurfacing when you least expect.

We all have a choice right now. Are we girls or are we demons? Are we going to die or are we going to survive?

Never forget: the same gift they praise you for now, they will kill you for later.

My anger builds as I realize how thoroughly my mind has been poisoned that I would be shocked to see women in these positions.

All this time, I've been afraid of my ability, when instead I should have been regarding it as a treasured weapon.

Keita is just like all the rest, giving us impossibilities and calling them choices.

He's crying as he kills me

They might need us now because we're valuable, might pretend to accept us, to reward us - but never forget what they did to us first.

No matter what White Hands is, no matter what she’s done, she’s saved the lives of countless girls. Rescued them from certain death. Rescued me.

like all the rest, giving us impossibilities and calling them choices.

was born and raised in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Sierra Leone is deeply patriarchal, and girls are often considered lesser than boys. When I moved to America, I hoped things would change, but I quickly realized it was the same. Perhaps the message wasn’t as in your face, but it was still there.

His words, his hate, strike deep into my heart. Bitches. A word just as ugly as all the others men throw at us. It’s all I can do not to unsheathe my swords, but I ask one last question. “Why didn’t you kill me the moment you knew what I was?

Demons?” White Hands dismisses the word with a wave of her hand. “The Gilded Ones were never demons. They were goddesses. They ruled Otera until their own sons rose up against them.

The emperor and his men, they can use White Hands and the rest of the karmokos to make us into warriors, they can even give us absolution, but they can never change what they did. They can never take back the horrors that have already been inflicted on us.

a constant reminder that women were created to be helpmeets to men, subservient to their desires and commands.

Do you think this is a game?” the proud girl snaps, aquiline features whipping, hawklike, towards Britta. “Do you think that we’re off to court, to learn how to be proper maidens and do needlework?” The girl leans closer, a sneer on her face. “We’re monsters, and they’re going to treat us like monsters. They’re going to use us, bleed us, and when they’re done, they’re going to find whatever our final deaths are and execute us one by one.

Every girl knows it by heart. We recite it whenever we enter a temple – a constant reminder that women were created to be helpmeets to men, subservient to their desires and commands.

I want to have a life, a real one this time.... But to do so, I have to survive. We all do

You’re nothing but a group of malformed demon spawn, and I hope to Oyomo the deathshrieks finish your kind off well before we return from the desert.

Mother was pregnant before she and Father ever met. Did White Hands have a hand in creating me – some sort of alaki breeding project? If I accept that she made Ixa, then it’s possible she made me, possible I’m some sort of shapeshifter as well. That could be why my eyes sometimes change, why I look like Father, even though there’s no way he’s my true parent.

An oddity. Something most of us have never seen before. You have to be careful of oddities, Deka. Sometimes, they can be dangerous things.

Other than my parents and Elfriede, no one’s ever smiled at me so much. I fight the urge to duck my head in embarrassment.

The man I left in Irfut was never truly my father – none of his blood runs in my veins. Perhaps that’s why he abandoned me so easily to the Death Mandate. Even though he always claimed me as his own, something deep inside him must have whispered I wasn’t his. That I shared none of his flesh, none of his blood.

I’m just grateful they found each other in the Warthu Bera, rather than a place like Irfut, where they would have been beaten, then forced into servitude as temple maidens for deviancy.

Cousin? The word is a lightning bolt through me. White Hands is a royal? I thought she was just a noble, high-ranking but of ordinary blood, as all the other nobles are. To think that she has imperial blood – the blood of the emperor – coursing through her veins. It explains so many things: the way people defer to her, her seeming confidence against all odds.

She was four years my junior. An admirable Shadow. Ferocious, determined. A pity what happened to her. She could have been a legend among us, but then she got with child. You, I presume?

I look down, that awful feeling rising inside me again. “No one ever wanted me,” I whisper. Besides, Elder Durkas always told us kissing led to impurity, and I tried so desperately to be pure, for all the good it did me.