A Priestess in Love - Part 1.

Many of her friends, older priestesses in their thirties and forties, spoke well of her, but there were others who thought her naive and unintelligent.

This was because Helena expressed heart-felt sorrow for the men of the Empire who were treated as non-equals in the eyes of the Amazoninan women.

Men were captured, castrated and sold as property - eunuchs forever enslaved.

The Amazon Empress would often declare ritualistic genocide of all insurgent men of the surrounding lands, where warrior women would slaughter innocent men by the hundereds - and return days later with the severed penises and testicles of exterminated males as gifts for the Empress.

Many times, the warriors would return with several intact male prisoners, who were laster publically emasculated and sold.

Helena was often scrutinized by her peers for not alowing herself to watch the public spectacle, which she though cruel and inhumane, as she often noticed the crowds of women and young girls cheered happily during the slicing.

Many never knew how Helena became a priestess in the first place. After all, she even refused to take part in her passage of rites from age of girlhood into womanhood...

It was an act which was heavily enforced by the government, that when all young Amazonian girls who come of age, they are brought into adult womanhood by castrating a man for the first time.

Helena would often remember that day when she and several other teenage girls of young age were brought into the Temple of the Goddess in the company of their mothers and watched as many male prisoners, blindfolded and shackled, were led naked into the temple and forced to stand in front of the girls in silence - as the young women took their sharp knives with eager willingness and proceeded to slice the flesh of their male slaves and offer the severed testicles as a sacrifice to the goddess.

Helena however, defied the conformist law and refused to take part in the act, which she openlyy denounced as barbaric, and continued to do so...even after she was forced to witness the castration of man she pardoned and was publicly humiliated by being forced to strip nude and be whipped relentlessly by order of the Empress.

It was in her order, that Helena would be beaten un-mercifully until she renounced her heretic ways.

Yet Helena never did.

She nearly passed-out from the pain at times, but still held stong by her convictions - not once listening to the harsh insults by angry spectators and continued to endure her punishement.

It was this strong will in Helena that interested the Empress.

Rather than be executed, Helena was saved from death and was given over by the Empress to the priestesses of the Empire, where Helena was taken in and cared for and taught in the ways of the female spirit.

On her arrival, she was cleansed and her wounds her dressed.

During her life there, she was tended to by other young priestesses and was bathed, dressed and tended to by eunuchs. Although there was little room for argument, Helena disliked her treatment by being served by castrated men.

But since all the priestesses were bathed, dressed, slept and ate communally, she could say very little...

To many of the community, Helena being taught as a Amazonian priestess gained some un-popularity. She was looked upon by some as a heretic, but since the Empress had given Helena a

second chance to prove herself, there was nothing that could be done.

When Helena finally became a priestess, almost all had been forgiven and forgotten. However, Helena still beleived that all she had been ever taught was wrong and continued to secretly disdain anti-male rhetoric.

While most of her childhood friends had become fierce warriors in service to the Empress, Helena served as a simple, "obidient" priestess, knowing one day she would soon leave the Amazonian Empire behind and being a new life elsewhere.

Soon that day would come...and it came by the name of Nikolas...