Legends of Belariath
Shannah
The early years
Shannah was born on a small farm tucked away in a small valley in the province of Valenica. Her father owned the farm and worked it hard, together with his his wife and two sons, and his bastard daughter Shannah. She was the daugher of one of the few farmhands he had hired from time to time and her mother hand died in childbirth.
Shannah, being the youngest learned to work hard from a very early age and her number of chores grew as she got older. She learned to cook, to keep a household such as it was and to take care of the few dairy animals the family had a small number of small cows.
Her family seemed to see her as unpaid help, more than a actual member of the family. And as Shannah grew of age her stepmother seemed to like her less and less as Shannah's beauty grew and she started to look more and more like the farmhand her father had betrayed her mother with. The family had little love for her and they punished her often, beated her, often for no reasons at all and told her to not be lazy, that she was no good at all.
Shannah rarely was allowed to leave the farm, and she almost never saw any other people than her family, and then it was just the few neighburs that even bothered to ever visit the farm. She wasn't tutored in any other skills than those needed on the farm.So her only friends, and her only refuge after being beatened was the animals on the farm. she was kept illiterat and learned only a few very basic spells as her family didn't see the need for her to know much at all about anything. In their eyes she was little more than a slave.
She liked the animals, working with them, especially the cows that seemed to soothe and calm her when she was crying after being punished. In lack of other friends she becan to seem to connect more and more to them as she grew older. when she at 18 had learned what would become her favourite spell, the milk spell, and she made a lot of use of that spell, secretly on herself too making her feel closer to her only friends, the cows.
The breakup
As Shannah grew into an adult, she became a quite beautiful young woman, slender built, not very muscular but with a strenght that came from her work. At 18 she had reached the height of 5 feet and she had long blonde hair, blue eyes and her breasts became more prominent, softly sound and firm. Her body grow to be slender and very flexible, she moved gracefully, softly and also found that she had easier to do her chores as her skills grew. She was still kept ignorant about most things outside her world of the family and the farm though.
It was, her beauty that would prove to be her undoing as her stepmother kept her dark and unkind eyes on Shannah, saw that the bastard was growing to be almost a picture of the young farmhand that her husband had taken an eye to. And that raven haired woman's hatred for Shannah grew for each passing month, building up to a point where it simply would have to erupt.
Shannah had just turned 18 years old when the breaking point of that eruption of hatred finaly came. The family had fallen into hard times, mostly due to bad farming as they had exhausted the fields with not rotating the crops they tried to grew on them. And the family was growing more and more desperate for income and had sold off most of their animals except for two of the cows and a pair of working horses. Shannah was working in the small barn of the farm, doing her chores, when a neighbur that fared much better than the family came by for one of the infrequent visits and the man had clearly something in mind as he asked to speak with Shannah's father and her Stepmother. it turned out that the man was propositioning them about the possibillity of having his oldest son marrying Shannah as she now was old enough and his son was having an eye for her.
Her father told the neighbur that they would think about it and the man seemed pleased with that and went on his way. This caused Shannah's stepmother to snap. The possibility of not only having Shannah being whisked away from the tyrrany of the family, but ending up in a family of her own and much, much better off than her family had been. That little Shannah would likely end up being loved and in a status above their own, that she just couldn't bear. She begun to argue about the dowry, about loosing their free unpaid farmhand, and the need for raising money instead of giving it away to his bastard. She then went off to find Shannah and while looking for her, the idea came to her how to finally deal with her husband's bastard.
Shannah had just finished the chores in the farm and was washing herself clean at a water trough, bare to the waist with her stepbrothers oogling her as they usually did, when her stepmother found her. And the sight of the blonde farmhand and dairy maid washing and exposing her young and beautiful creamy white upper body like that in front of her sons, made the older woman snap. She was much stronger and much, much more cruel and mean than Shannah and begun to beat her with a cane while screaming in rage, calling shannah slut and whore amongst other things. She beated Shannah until the blonde farmhand was unconscious and then had her sons locking her up in the small room at the back of the house on the small cot that served as Shannah's bed.
As shannah slowly regained consciousness, most of her body ached, and she was dizzy, having no idea of why she had been beatened so hard and for so long. Gradually she became aware of the voices from the main room of the farmhouse and began to listen to the arguments. She heard her stepmother telling her father, obviously not for the first time that evening about all the faults of Shannah, from the day she was concieved until now, and how her stepmother had came up with an idea of getting her final revenge and also make money from the slut. they would let her heal and regain her beauty, then they would chain her and her stepmother would take her to town and sell her on the slave block!
A little later, after she had heard her father finally agreeing as they would likely get more money by selling shannah into slavery than they could get for several years of hard work on the farm, her stepmother unlocked the door and stepped into the small room to check on her. Shannah feigned to be still unconscious, her face swollen and bruised, her body starting to get black and blue in many, acheing, places. Her stepmother took a rag and some water and begun to wash the grime from the muddy ground from her body while muttering gleefully about what would be done to her. Shannah kept pretending to be unconscious all the time, but her mind was working fast as she heard the pure hatred in her stepmothers voice. She was young with a gorgeous body, would be beautiful when brought to the slave block to be sold, catching a good price. And her stepmother would make sure it was to a cruel owner, not someone that would take good care of her.
After her stepmother had left her, Shannah felt as if she was going to be sick. But she know she had to act fast if she would have any chance of escaping the fate that now was surely awaiting her. She didn't have many belongings at all, and they all fit in a small bundle made with the few clothes she had. The door to her room was locked, or rather blocked by a heavy chest leaving her with no escape except for a small window that she barely could squeeze through in the night. She knew she had to hurry and just stole some food, then took a tearfull goodbye of her only friends, the cows, and then was on her way.
The cow girl
Shannah kept away from the neighburs as she feared they would either return her to her family, or at least tell her family of where she had gone. She didn't manage to go very far these first nights and days as she had been severely beatened, but she managed to stay away from any pursuit. She needed to get far away though, she knew that and after weeks of walking, allways hungry, allways tired, she found an old and abandoned hunters hut, a mud hut,deep in the forests outside Nanthalion. She was too exhausted to move on and had to stay there and it at least gave some shelter. It wasn't big, just twice the size of the small cot inside. But she cleaned it up and repaired it so she could stay. It gave her shelter for the winter even if she seldom was warm and allways was hungry as she had only had what she could find in the forests around her. But to her, it was a house of her own, a place where she thought she was safe as she was sure she had crossed over the border.
Then one day in mid winter there was a knock on the door just as a blizzard was starting to blow. Shannah had a small fire going in an old and rusty stove, barely enough to keep her from freezing and got up from the cot as the door was pulled open and a stranger entered without asking. He was old, worn and in far worse shape than she was, but he was big and she was defenceless. He seemed to be a moriel, and to her surprise, he didn't hurt her even if he was gnarled and gruffy and obviously ill. Shannah shared what little she had with him, food, hot water from the stove and, as she had nothing else to give him, milk from her breasts when he was feverish and too sick to eat. She desperatly needed a friend by now, and as he was the only one around, she just couldn't turn him away or let him die. She nurtured and nursed him, shared the bed with him to keep him from freezing and learned about things she had no personal experience about in practise. Sex.
During that winter a very special friendship developed between the moriel and Shannah. They gave eachother something they both needed, shared more than the hut and the bed together. She told him of herself, of her life and her desires and dreams. He in turn started to call her his little cow and she found she really liked that a lot, especially as he took as his chore to milk her each day. She had after learning the milk spell used it not only on the cows on the farm to make them yeild more milk, especially when the family had sold off most of the cows, but also on herself, secretly and had even started to use her own milk to mix with the cow milk in the dairy. She had also started to experiment on making dairy products from only her own milk, without anyone else knowing about it. Now, she found she liked being treated like as if she was a cow, more and more. Probably as she had grown up with only cows as her friends.
Without her knowing, the old moriel took things even further some time later on. He brought her things for her hut, household things, but also what he called a milking stock. A set of stocks where she could be locked into standing on all fours with her wrists and ankles and neck secured while he milked her into a pail. The moriel started to work on her mind too, changeing her gradually as he found her to be quite simple to work with. Her mind had been that starved while she grew up that she didn't even realise what was happening until it was too late. And by then she found that she actually loved what he was doing, loved what he was turning her into and she wanted to please him, more and more. From the moriel, she learned the change self spell and with that she started to add darker patches on her smooth and pale skin, imitating the patterns found on brown and white cows. She became more and more secure in herself, even proud of what she had become.
When the moriel asked her to move, from the hut and into a shack he had on his lands, Shannah was more than willing to do so and to become his tennant. She paid her lease for the shack to him with her products and with her body, letting him use her not only for pleasure, but also for his work as a human lab rat. By this time her love for him had grown into worshipping him and she started to refer to him as her "creator" which is pretty much what he had became for her. She had a small dairy in the cellar of her shack, and she started to give small round soft cheeses away as presents to people, and even selling some for money at times. After some time, she moved away from the moriel's lands and now have a cabin on her own small plot of land not far from the town. It too, have a small dairy where she is often busy making cheese or other dairy products, but... she is never seen with any dairy animals.
Shannah knows, she is a human and can never be anything else, but at the same time, she is pleased being herself, as she is. As she have become to be, she is what she wants to be, as she desires. In all respects that counts for her, she is a cow girl.