The Cycle of Yvan, 19th cycle of the Month of the Great Sea, 1932 years after Creation / Thursday, 29th of January 6099
Today I saw Avala again. She was still wearing her normal Evelon II clothing. I don’t think she likes the feel of human clothing. Also, she hasn’t seem to have bathed yet. I’m actually not sure she has ever bathed in her life. Bathing was a luxury for the cultural elite on Evelon II, or for those who lived near water that wasn’t frozen.
We lived very close to the night side of the tidally-locked planet, near what they called the frozen wastes. The only water nearby that wasn’t frozen were the steam pools in one of the many nearby caves, and that place was more often or not a place where men took their wives for sex in full view of other men. It wasn’t a place either me or Avala ever wanted to go.
However, we did go there once, but only to convince other men that we were having sex. In reality, I used a holographic projector given to me by the Republic to project the image that we were doing it, and then hid the real us away under a holographic rock. The reason we did that was Avala was worried people would realize I wasn’t having sex with her, because she hadn’t gotten pregnant yet, and we had never been seen together doing anything sexual. In the Athakarin world, that was a great sin, to be married to a woman but not having sex with her, and Avala knew it. She knew if people found out, both of us would be sacrificed to the spirits.
This way of thinking was so ingrained into her, that she was trying to beg me to do it with her. I refused, since sex while under duress is not consensual, and that’s on top of the fact that she was only twelve at the time, and under the Republic Age of Consent.
However even after doing that, Avala had been kidnapped by a jealous man who wanted her for his own. Fortunately, the man died before she could take off any of her clothes, I had killed him. Yet, even though the whole village knew I murdered him, I got away with it. In Athakarin law, what I did was I got my own justice; I killed the man who ‘stole my wife’. There was nothing wrong with that in their eyes.
I shake my head at the barbarism of that world and what it did to poor young Avala. I’ve already asked the Adjutant to keep an eye on her in case any trauma from her youth turns into something far worse, such as PTSD.
Sometimes I wish I was living back of Evelon II still. But other times, I am glad I now live in a proper civilized place again, and that our marriage was annulled. I don’t even want to think what would have happened if I had lived there until Avala turned eighteen. At that point, I would have had very little excuse to do it with Avala, other than some argument that it was still non-consensual, but it wouldn’t have mattered to her and we would have been forced to do it. That would have destroyed me.
~ Allan Ali, Codename: Alvaj – Rank A Agent of the EIS
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Caleb Teal
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, places, or events of the modern time are used in a fictional sense and have no bearing or reality, nor are they meant to detract from the real them in any way. And all characters are the complete creation of the author, any resemblance to real world people is complete coincidence.
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