INDOMITABLE

TRIGGER WARNINGS

c/sa, rape, child trafficking, sexual slavery, violence of all shapes and shades and colors, suicide, all abuses imaginable and some not

CREDITS

photo samples by write me

IN SUMMARY

a genius child slave becomes a warlord harboring questions about what dominates the human heart. mew thinks it is loyalty. everyone they meet has a different wish. they clash with heaven, hell, and earth and devils from all three realms for the permission to live.

CHAPTER 1:

The question of what dominates the red human heart is eternal. In every human heart there is ego, pride, arrogance, affection, doting, jealousy, rage, spite, sorrow, despair, longing, yearning, desperation, joy, play, caprice, impulse, wanting. There is more, but there is at least that.But what dominates? Is there more cruelty and the need to crush others to preemptively strike in defense of one's own ego, or is humanity dominated by the desire to protect and defend loyalty (loyally). And are these two different, or simply two sides of the same thing?You, Mew, don't know.But you, Mew, a kitten boy born a slave, know that even the moon slave brand on your forehead provides the protection of the master you serve.The caged bird tag of your master's seal means that you can only be “touched” by the master, who wants to turn your organs inside out with their fist through your asshole, but only your master can lay a finger on you.Unless other lords want to stain the master's property, insulting the master, and breeding conflict and excuses for bloodshed between their lord-doms. (Are they kings? With kingdoms? No, because kingdoms have people, subjects. Lords only have property, “the kinds of people that are owned," and territories they pay killers to defend.)

CHAPTER 1:

You, Mew, swish your tail as you sit on the bed with a blank expression, like a dull doll that's a bit too observant. An older servant of the Opal Manor pitied you curiously today.She said, “O, lords of heaven, if any one of you creatures is listening, spare this child… Barely bigger than a bug-infant! Yet the master rapes it every night. How, in a gracious world, could this be…”Obviously, it's not a gracious world. Moreover, what is rape? But even after asking some other servants and judges and knights of the manor, you can't quite tell. It doesn't quite seem correct to apply.You rub the fragrant shimmering oil, set to leave residue from a solid soap at room temperature, over your arms and legs, flicking and shaking your cat tail and ears. Your hair has already been rubbed and primmed and pulled with the stuff that smells like temple ash from burnt holy wood. You're currently still in clothes, if you can call the gossamer that.Rape, as you, Mew, understand it is a special kind of sexual violence, but it also carries an accusation and a fire-needle sting that to you is more of an absent-minded shrug and a sigh of indifference… This is a word that describes something that isn't supposed to happen, but you don't use it for a tom claiming a molly among allycats.Mew's master is a tom. Who was claimed as a molly before he knew the word for a four-legged feline. He is not very smart. Well, is he your master? That's Grandmother, but Grandmother is the Grandmaster, and your lord is just a tom who also used to be a molly-kitten, who flayed the brand off his own forehead. He is insane.You don't like or respect him. But you understand that in this world of lilyhouses and lordsthings you can either be a slave or a slaver, and the only option for most incompetent slaves is to become the eunuchs or the pleasure-trainers, and those who don't dominate are dominated. Your current moon-master wasn't fond of his own castration and didn't possess the cleverness required of a eunuch to survive in the palace.So he could only cut off his own cat ears and tail and scrape his own brand away and act like the ugliest human being before anyone noticed how pretty his figure still is. I pity you. What a fool that will amount to nothing. But you know if he had ambition, he would amount to less than the sludgy shit dungmice track in the sewers.

THOSE WITH SENSE HAVE NO AMBITION; THOSE WITH AMBITION HAVE NO SENSE.

But you, Mew, are a genius unparalleled.

You have sense and ambition.
At the age of 4.

CHAPTER 2:

By 13 the unspeakable has happened. The grandmaster has died. A hundred-year old slaver wasn't going to last longer than the skin she wore. And even the serpent that is the ouroboros dies. The chronology of your life is not linear; age 8 was your first massacre, and it was cruder than a child's first soot finger drawing. But it was cleverer than any imperial child had the right to be. And you are a slave, not an imperial child.The grandmaster died well before 13; she died when you were 6. But she was announced dead at 13, at which point she lost legal custody of you, at which point your incompetent barely-whisper-edge noble parents re-purchased you from the government, and every fool in the kingdom praised you for your doll face (Even the sneering playground bullies called you Dollface) and said your grandmother must have spoiled you rotten, look at what complicated magicks she used on your ornamental crown (crescent moon forehead slave brand) and look at that 魔法石 (magustine, mahouseki, magicite) jade bangle she bequeathed to you, ("I'm so jealous!")(A bangle is a name for a piece of jewelry. This is a crystalline tracking shackle and lilyhouse tag that indicates the price of the goods. I was meant to grow out of the jade ring, and at 13, even thin, it suffocates my wrist. It was meant to be broken and replaced two years ago. But I still can't bring myself to break it.)(You loved Grandmother. Who are these incompetent ghouls and fools raising a rice dumpling with no filling (called your younger sister) while you were being raised in a gilded casket nobles now tease you about being envious of.)

CHAPTER 2:

Grandmother left behind the jade you're currently wearing as part of her posthumous belongings you snatched before the rest became rubbish fought over by fake kings. You broke the one from when you were 6 when you outgrew it, and the one now you've been wearing since. You bound the curse's shackle yourself. You have nothing else.You joined the royal war academy adjacent to your sister who may as well have been a wet lump of rice flour. You graduated with proper credentials and barely-noble pedigree early at 19 when you simply took the final exams instead of wasting any more time, though they accused you of cheating and held you back a year to learn nothing and achieve the same results again.The war academy is a sham pretending you can teach the art of war to someone who can't even remember the soldiers and the horses on the war ground need to be fed and watered. The war academy produces politicians that try to justify sending pennies worth of rice because it can be watered to gruel, and if the soldiers are “fed” then they can fight (Who cares if they're starving, it's not my family on the front lines!)Grandmother admitted she had no talent for innovation. She lacked imagination, adaptability beyond which precedent to replicate, but she could replicate anything to a perfect facsimile. That's why she had her incompetent daughter marry the failed son of a legendary warlord of a nation that lost their side of the civil war. She hoped her wits and his would spark in the next generation.They did, in you.

CHAPTER 2:

Grandmother raised you, fed you by hand.She asked you scenarios such as, you have your grains of rice, and you have their grains of rice. When you asked if the others were evil, she said no. You just don't like them. But they have one rice grain you do really like, and you want to make this rice grain your friend and be friends with your friends. Later, you understood this practice as Turncoat.If you got the answers wrong, she wouldn't cook the rice for you. Until you revised and reflected. If it was satisfactory, she would feed you the cooked jasmine rice. If it was exemplary, she would give you a canned pennywort drink.You loved her. She listened to you. She respected you, with the mind of an immortal in your eyes, the intelligence gleaming like mahouseki jade. So cool and elegant you can almost smell the smooth, soft winter blossoms blushing into fruit.At 19, after becoming one of the youngest graduates of the imperial war academy of jupiter, you return to the villages on the northern coast. Where the air smells “dirty,” like seawater, and the wind sweeping the salt down your throat like cold mineral drift is inescapable, choking. But more beautiful than anything else, because the pink flowers springing from the noble, dark branches remind you of Grandmother.It's not as if nothing happened all those years.

But it's also like
you were waiting to live.

CHAPTER 3:

Seeing the fuchsia bloom in the salted air where children play the glass piamo, piano te amo, which is an instrument that snide nobles claim only children savages and beasts can play…The piamo looks something like a mermaid's imagination of a piano carved from sea vine, bone, and shell, held together by the entails of sea slugs and other living sludge and jellies… It's translucent like opal glass, and when it is played, the sound is like an eternity miracle, like a glass bell chime ringing to the sound of the wind.A piamo can't be played by a pianist who only knows academic pedigree and alphabet and formulaic composition. A piamo has keys like a piano, but you mustn't think of them like spice jar labeled notes. A piamo must be played with pure emotion.The magic of the song within your heart produces the sound. This is why only illiterate sea urchin children and “beasts” (human beings) can play the piamo. That's why nobles despise it as a kid's toy or a piece of shameful uncivilized piece of shit. (The piamo doesn't care about your pedigree. Are you anything without it?)

CHAPTER 3:

You look at the sea with longing.If there's nowhere else in the world to go, can you still call it home? There's nowhere but my mind I can be.How come the sea calls so for me?“It's actually a lake,” someone says behind you.“The sea?” you say.“Swan Lake. In the summer sunset the swans gather and mate.”The person standing next to you, leaning on the glass piamo, is a tall, fey-like presence whose fingers shed glitter trails on the piamo and whose luna moth wings flutter, scattering ethereal dust. The fairy has bold, silvery-lilac brows and a strong widow's peak and eyes that are a dark mismatch and shape and set for the stone, compared to the masterful, whimsical jewel of the work.He looks like what both fairies and hitobito call “dirty water,” where the blood of both parentage is thin and ambiguous.“If I'm not mistaken, you're the former Student Council President Madylaine's brother,” you say.You had whatever relationship can be described between a fellow student council member's older brother and the scum villain who only joined the student council to have an alibi and higher permissions to roam the war college. You were busy… you needed a key to certain various locations, and obtaining them legally was the best method.“She still calls me her brother? Tsk, she should know I'm a fine woman now.”“This is in no way at all remotely apparent to anyone whatsoever, but I've seen less fine women and men and children and dogs, so I do believe fine in terms of aesthetic quality is indeed accurate.”“My, you're quite the snake charmer.”“Naturally, as a cat, snakes and I have a union membership as charmless fellows.” You flick your tail. “Eldest sister of the former Student Council President, whatever brings you so far south?”The fairy doesn't resemble her sister at all. The sister is a mouse-haired, bespeckled, bastard grey wolf dug from the streets, but the family is devoting every resource grinding that pebble into pearl. The fairy is the rightful inheritant, but Madylaine has waved it off as saying Eldest Brother is Grandaunt’s brood, and left her mouth screwed tight about any other family affair.“You know my sister hated you,” the fairy purses her thin, sakura-pink lips. “She often shrine-cursed you in her room on the mantle.”You blink, staring blankly. Maddy? Every memory you have is accomplishing your work swiftly, efficiently, and flawlessly before scuttling off to do real tasks, like smuggling pistol blueprints. You had a faint childlike crush on Madylaine, a plain, hardworking, and simple girl with mossy, earthen eyes that would illuminate with twinkling autumn gold in the light when she smiled as you flushed, foraging for berries together. You gave her the biggest, most rubious heart-shaped berries studded with fine, black seeds tinier than ladybeetle eyes, like some kind of childish offering and wish of appeasement.You knew such a thing would never work out, but you had a tiny hole in your heart that dreamt of having a sweetheart's kiss, even just a peck on the cheek, but you knew, you weren't so weak as to dare to manifest it to be true.She hated you?“Why? She was… always nice to me.”“Was she? Or was she hiding her petty vents, crude schemes, and vengeful jealous plots?” The fairy licks the tip of one of her seven fingers. “Did you never notice she gave you more work than the others, and that it was harder work, at unreasonable amounts, making cruel and bizarre demands, to the point others asked her to stop?”This was true, at a certain angle… “She trusted me to do the work well and efficiently and correctly. ““She wanted you to fail. She set you up to fail.”“Isn't it good I exceeded expectations?”“Didn't she hit you once because you did? She came back to our ancestral home screaming and crying that she had wished she knifed your ‘ugly bitch face’ so everyone would know how you really looked inside.” The fairy smiles wryly. “Of course, she was projecting how she felt about herself onto you.”You remember that. You had completed her task and were running up to her in the empty, echoing marble hall, the bluish blush black veins of marble glimmering in the setting twilight, and you were so happy to tell her you'd finished. You beamed at her shyly, hoping for a word of praise.Her face twisted for the first time and she lunged and smacked you with the stinging open hand of someone who doesn't know how to hit someone. You had blinked, surprised, and then asked her what was wrong, and if something had upset her, and that you weren't good with talking, but would listen (be loyal,) but she had stifled tears, turned the clammy snail meat color of nausea, growled, and stormed away.“I thought the pressures of the student council were just weighing on her, or the pressures of being a noble.”“No, it was you.”“But,” you ask, blankly, “what did I do to hurt her? Isn't it right to hit me if I hurt her?”“No, it wasn't, and you didn't do anything but do things better.” The fairy lifts one too-long finger. “That's why the emperor wants to recruit you. Isn't that why you ran away?”