Excerpts from the Okal Rel Universe...

copyright Lynda Williams

Demish vs. Vrellish take on Ev'rel's exile (From novel Courtesan Prince)

"Delm raped her?" D'Ander said, horrified.

"She was not yet fully grown," Di Mon defended Ev'rel's failure to defeat her half-brother, physically, and sighed. "Although, in truth, I never was able to teach her how to fight."

"Why should she have needed to!" D'Ander exclaimed, "Gods, man. She's half Demish, and a woman." He snorted in confused sympathy. "There is little love lost between Ev'rel, where she rules today in exile, and my allies. But then? She was little more than a child!" He shook his head. "Why didn't you accuse Delm at the trail!"

"Why?" Di Mon asked, blandly.

"It would have gained her sympathy in Demish circles."

"Really?" Di Mon's expression soured. "I am not so sure. Not when the servants I learned it from also corroborated Delm's accusations concerning how she used Rush on her gorarelpul, Arous."

D'Ander shook his head. "You can't compare her helping him, in that way, to rape."

"Helping?" Di Mon echoed, incredulous. Ev'rel had injured Arous in a dozen, petty ways. And in the end she'd killed him with an overdose of the sex drug. But no doubt the Demish prince would insist the commoner had died happy.

"Delm's a fool, and a vain one," D'Ander growled, "but I never thought a grandson of the Golden Emperor could rape a woman! And I cannot credit why you did not do more at the time to expose him for the cur he was. I would have."

Di Mon locked his jaw against contending with such Demish nonsense. He had spoken with Ev'rel. He had tried to help her. But D'Ander saw guilt flowing only in the one direction, while he had no doubt she was guilty, herself, with regard to her gorarelpul. Guilty in an eerie, hybrid Demish way which seemed more sinister than Red Reach rape of a captive male enemy prior to execution, which if it could not be excused, was at least explained by the woman's desire to co-op strong, enemy souls into her line and was set amid the life and death passions of space combat and station taking. Not something done in cold blood in a bedroom.

Ev'rel had been raped by a fellow Sevolite, but she was also a rapist of commoners, and that fact had pulled the teeth of Di Mon's indignation towards Delm. But there was no good explaining that. The Demish seemed incapable of understanding Vrellish women were not just a skirt and bit of lace shy of being one of the foolish, fainting things they so admired.

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