HOME | DD

Description

image by dashinvaine
FOOTSTEPS.
   The young girl tried vainly to ignore them, staring ahead into the gloom with glazed-over eyes. Then she began to tremble with sudden, gut-wrenching panic. Cold sweat burst forth on her body, leaving her shivering, and her heart hammered in her head like a stampede of horses. Her breath came uneasily, in frenzied gulps, like those of a stranded fish, grasping, gasping, fighting for air.
   How often had the sound of footsteps, mostly passing by, not even destined for her, caused this terrible, sickening fear she had long lost control over? How many of these sounds had she simply imagined, fear and dread cycling endlessly, leaving no room for any other feeling.
   There was little she could do about the panic but futilely try to blink away unwelcome, unrestrainable tears. Pulling at the restraining chains for support between her spasms, she could but hope with pitiful, frantic despair that this time the steps would pass too, leaving her in peace in the cold darkness of her cell for just a bit more. She could not remember ever wishing for something so fervently, putting every ounce of what remained of her being into it with an obsession that left her shaking with the effort. Her nails dug into her palms, as her mouth moved in a frantic, silent prayer to the Silver Flame: she lacked even the energy to whisper.
   At least, she still kept her faith, though it was a besieged bastion, assaulted by despair and fear; a bastion as small as it was determined to hold out in spite of everything.
   At the turn of a key in the heavy lock she raised a weak head, closing her eyes with the effort even that simple movement involved. Her hopes lay shattered, yet again. She swallowed back the tears of terror that simple sound raised every time someone came in, whether to take her along to some further torment, or merely bringing some of the disgusting, foul food and drink she received at irregular intervals. Instinctively, she wanted to cower in the dirty corner, yet, chained as she was to the wall and the floor, even that little refuge was denied her.
   Yet even after all this time, after what felt like years, she kept enough pride to make pitiful attempts at hiding her fear from the newcomers, to stare at their unseen faces as defiantly as her tired eyes and her body shaking with cold, fear and weakness could. She still managed to defy them, at least for a while, before she had to cast her gaze down again, admitting her defeat and submission.
   She had always been a headstrong girl, and though they had eroded her entire being to a small core of stubborn defiance and desperate faith, and replaced it with shame, humiliation, and dread, she still held on to that little bit of herself. She never managed to stare at them for long. But even when she had to lower her gaze, her inborn refusal of authority had so far kept her from completely giving herself over to them. Instead, she was fleeing into herself, isolating herself from even them.
   She still ached from every pain her body remembered. The wounds themselves had been healed; her tormentors were always careful about not causing lasting damage. But the pain stayed behind, disconnected from the actual physical effects, memories of hurts in places and of kinds that she would never have imagined possible. The pain lingered after the wounds were gone. It arrived even before they were afflicted, at the mere sight of the instruments or even the men.
   A few months ago, she would never have thought that curing magic could be employed with cruelty. But these endless torments had taught her different. All healing magic did now was prevent the body from releasing the soul. It allowed them to prolong the torment, to whittle her defences down until all that remained was a shaking, quivering wretch in a corner, not far from what she was now. In the darkness of the small cell, she was not even sure which wounds had healed, and which were still visible. The simplest movements revived every pain, and there was no position she could adopt that was not hurting.
   All that was nothing compared to the agonising pain newly inflicted every so often on an unscarred, freshly healed body. With cold, slow method, previous hurts were revived and new, even more excruciating pains were called forth. Constantly, they added to the many others that refused to disappear along with the wounds. But even that paled when compared to the fear that preceded such torments, a fear kindled and tended carefully by the explanations that came before each torture. The men revealed sufficient details to give her imagination enough to play with, but left her mind much to make up by itself. They gave her enough time to work her fear up, when they laid out their instruments with casual slowness. By now, they merely had to show her new instruments, without speaking. Her mind did the rest. In her own imaginings, she increased the expected pain beyond any they could actually inflict.
   And the men who tormented her were speaking with such a regret in their voices, that she almost believed them when they said that it was all her own doing. She had begun, for brief instants, to accept that it was her fault, that she forced the men to hurt her because she was stubborn, or even tainted by evil spirits. She knew that by cooperating, she could stop the pain at once. She almost trusted that they pitied her, that they were sorry for her, and that they wished her no evil.
   Her world had been innocent and pure. There had been setbacks before, but she had always been wildly carefree, as fey as her ancestors. Previous trials had always been adventures, exciting and thrilling. She had faced the world with boundless idealism, her life a wild dance and a merry song. That worldview was as shattered now as her body. She could not even remember what singing sounded like. Now she felt the urges to give in and open up to the robed men, the only people in the world. She had to fight off ever more frequent thoughts off thinking of them as parents, kind and caring, and wishing their stubborn girl would but obey them. But somehow, she still remembered how to be obstinate.

Even the simple turning of a key in the lock to her cell was now enough to conjure up the terror fanned by of her imagination. It was not, anymore, a detailed, specific imagination, but a vague assembly of images, memories and fears. She was ashamed of being afraid, humiliated that she reacted so strongly to footsteps passing by outside.
   She was left alone with that shame, too. Nobody blamed her for her fear. She wished someone would, that she might defend herself. Instead, they merely pitied her. She hated it when they did that, because it made her feel even weaker.
   She had not properly defended herself for a long time now. At first, she had struggled constantly against the chains and the pain, answered their accusations with her natural spirit, and given them a few wounds before they beat her down again. She had spit and raged at them, suppressed yells of pain and substituted them with fierce taunts. She had challenged them, for a long time, accepting the tortures with the power of her idealism as another heroic adventure.
   But her spirit had been worn away to a small core, a tiny candle holding against the darkness.
   Now, except when panic overtook her so completely as to give her a strength of its own, she was contend merely to keep the entire amount of her fear from showing. She let them drag her and handle her without putting up any resistance. She even found herself going along with them occasionally, out of resignation and muting despair. She hated herself for that too, felt ashamed and feeble.
   She had refused to scream, in the beginning. Now, even that sound was difficult. She barely found the energy to moan softly, interrupting the incessant movement of her lips in silent prayers to the Silver Flame. Almost automatically, she even remembered to include her sister in them. It was some comfort that her twin at least would live on in that different world above, and she prayed that she would remain in it.

As the door opened, she half hoped that by not showing any reaction they would lose interest in her, that they would simply forget her. That hope was never fulfilled. Those who controlled her world were patient, and never became tired. Unlike her, they were strong, powerful, and enduring.
   Frequently, what she hoped was that if she closed her eyes to everything, she would just not exist anymore. She would spent her time sitting there, hanging from the arm-chains and trying to shut out any feelings. She tried to welcome the melancholy of the realm of the dead. To her, that far plane seemed a paradise. But she was unworthy of being admitted even there, let alone join with the Silver Flame. She could change that, she had been told by the kind fathers. But she was too stubborn to do what was expected of her.
   She still fought against the despair, and tried to turn shame into anger. But it became harder with each day. She instinctively shrank away from the slightest noise. She cowered from the men who brought her food and the rats who stole it from her when she was too weak to prevent them. With the men, she still managed to put up a show of defiance, but even if she had been able to bluff them, she herself could not hide from herself how she had flinched, how much fear she felt.
   And once the cell door was shut, when even the rest of the dungeon was in another world, all trace of defiance left her and the only thing she was left with what the deep awareness of her weakness, her unworthiness, enhanced by the latest experience where she had failed to have any effect on things.

These days, she could not even summon up the power of her mark to talk to the rats. They were mostly hostile and uncaring anyway, occasionally running over her, licking grime and blood that glued to her skin after her tortures. She was too weak to keep them off, and the creatures had the free run of her body. They even bit her when she moved, or just like that; tried to steal her food, and often succeeded. Rats, even lice were stronger than she was, disdaining her in the knowledge that her chains, and above all her weakness prevented her from fighting back.
   She felt worthless, robbed of all that she once had. Most of her talents she could not even remember. The gifts of her heritage, fey and dragonmarked, were stolen from her. She had given up trying. The last few times she had called upon he mark, she had failed to do more than have a faint warmth spread over her neck and shoulder. What connection to the divine she had, safe the very essence of her faith, were stripped off her in an excommunication ritual. The protection of the Silver Flame had weakened, leaving her naked and exposed in front of the ordeals. She could not call on its spells anymore, nor on the rituals of the druids. Her connections to the land itself had been severed, leaving her utterly crippled and even more forlorn.
   Yet somehow, she still kept her mind strong enough to resist their intrusions. At every session before the robed men, she felt their probing thoughts, some seeking to thrust violently through her defences, others seeking to softly insinuate themselves, just as she had once been able to do, when she was still blessed by the Flame. Long ago, one foe had managed to casually read her mind, and bared her family and sister to their attack. Since then, she had learned to close off her thoughts, and till now, she even held firm during the strongest of the tortures designed to make her relent.

The door to the small cell opened inwards. With an impossible effort, she forced herself out of her protective position of hugging the wall. A brief burst of fierce, nearly forgotten rebellion gave her the strength to draw herself up as much as the chains allowed her. Her arms were shackled, the chain between them running through a loop that would have been in her mid-back if she had been able to stand. That feat was prohibited by the other loop, through which ran the chain of her ankle bonds, and which was placed further away on the ground, though not far enough for her weak legs to stretch. Finding a comfortable position was a constant fight. The discomfort made sleep, nightmare haunted as it was, painfully slow in arriving: if the ankle-hoop prevented her from standing, the one on the wall made lying on the floor impossible. Often, she awoke to painful cramps.
   Eating and drinking were likewise troublesome. The former was done irregularly, when one of the guards came in and pressed one of the stale, dry pieces of bread into her hand. It was difficult to chew, and occasionally slipped her grasp to fall down to the floor where here desperate attempts to grasp it again were futile. The rats had even learned to run up her body when she was too weak to resist, and tried to snatch the bread. As for water, they had a pitcher that was attached to a rope, which ran through a loop in the wall beside her. She could pull it up by dragging on the rope, though it was heavy when filled. Dropping it risked spilling much of the water, as did jerking against it. Occasionally, she hid her food in the water. The bread would become mouldy, but easier to chew, and she would not have to worry about dropping it.
   The guards knew what the food was worth to her, and she had to endure much humiliation from them. Fear of the masters of the place, she knew, kept them from raping her outright, and that little certainty gave her some power. But every other form of abasement the guards could devise and invent, she had to bear, along with comments mocking her compliance. Such remarks hit deep. They were yet another demonstration of her worthless nature.
   Her chains did more than just restrain her. They were made from cold-forged iron, anathema to one of fey blood. The touch of the metal wearied her, numbing her senses. No longer could she try a spell, nor change her shape into that of an animal or call upon the magic of her music. She could not summon the dancing lights, nor turn herself invisible, nor clean herself with her innate magic. Worst of all, she could no longer feel Fiontán, and she had lost every sense of her sister. The burden of loneliness was crushing her, weighting heavier than the chains themselves. Her sibling was the only person she could still remember with her last capacity for fondness; everyone else was forgotten, unreal enough that she could not be sure they had ever existed.
   As a result, her show of defiance was achieved by sitting as straight as she could, and staring as boldly at the three men who had entered her cell as her numb head allowed. By the reaction her visitors showed her, she might not have bothered. They gave no indication that they realised there was another person in the small cell. She was merely a feature to be moved around. The girl bit her lips to stop herself from trembling, as she awaited the unavoidable.
   Rimmed in the frame of the cell door, two guards flanked a central figure. This man was clad in black robes etched with silver tongues of flames, his face obscured by a tall, pointy hood that left openings only for the eyes. She dimly remembered that this indicated the robed men were so afraid of their prisoners they dared not show their faces. That thought had given her some strength, once. Yet now, their lack of personality just made them even more frightening, and confirmed her in her loneliness.

The two guards moved to either side of her, both clad in polished silver breastplates and conical helmets, worn above a black uniform. Arm protectors and greaves completed their garb, making them immune against kicks into the shin, as she had found out long ago. Both soldiers were armed with swords, hanging from their side in their sheaths, and one of them held a torch. It burned silver, like all the flames in the dungeon. In the light of the flickering torch, she could see the faces of the guards, their obvious contempt and their hidden lust showing plain upon them.
   She became acutely conscious again of her own nudity. It was strange that this should bother her. She was born and raised in the Eldeen Reaches, where the strangely prudish taboos of the Five Nations were unknown. Many religious ceremonies of the druid cults were carried in out in the nude, and some of the nation’s warriors famously fought naked.
   But the guards managed to thrust their own social conventions on her. Their looks alone made it clear that they saw her nakedness not as natural, but as an invitation. They examined her thoroughly, turning her into an object. And they were in power. She could not avoid adopting their point of view, because hers did not matter. She understood all this, and knew the purpose behind the instructions to strip during the first question, while the assembled hooded men and the guards had looked on.
   Even now, she felt herself blushing under the men’s lecherous gazes, virtually feeling them on her naked skin. She silently cursed herself for that reaction but refused to look down, until one of the men caught her gaze and grinned at her. No, whatever he had planned before, he would not let her go without abusing her some more today. Fortunately, there was the hooded man, who would punish guards who did not meet his high ideals, though he would also punish her for tempting the proud soldiers of the faith with her fey magic.
   For indeed, though she was not overly tall or busty, her beauty was supernatural, and unequalled by any in Thrane. She had always been slender, the ribs showing through on her skin even when she had been able to eat her fill, and her body had gone through physical conditioning. Along her neck, the glittering pattern of a dragonmark lay hidden by the hair, reddish-brown and falling down to over her shoulders. It was unkempt and wild and filthy, but framed a mischievous, fey face with friendly, deep brown eyes.
   It was part of her doom. It drew the attention of the guards, and made her the favourite prey of their amusement. It had earned her even fiercer torture as a punishment for making the hooded men have feelings which they did not allow themselves to have. She was horrified about that concept; she had never flaunted her beauty, never tried to seduce anyone. She had been too innocent, too carefree to even think about that.
   Most of all, it earned her an almost instant condemnation. When the men in the black hoods had found out that their needles did not hurt her, they had tried first silver and then cold iron. That only the latter hurt her was seen as proof incontestable that she was fiend-touched. She had tried to tell them that the fey were not fiends, but to now avail.
   The long time in the prison had only marred her beauty slightly. Magical healing, though applied slowly, meant there were no external signs of the uncounted torments she had gone through. She was thin, nourished just enough to survive and endure the tortures, and covered with grime, filthy sweat and dried blood. Away from the sun, which she had not seen since they had brought her to the tribunal in chains for the first time, her skin was pale. But overall, she still looked a beauty. That too was considered a proof that she was tainted.
   A few tears that had escaped despite her best efforts shone on her blushing cheeks. She finally cast her gaze down under the guards’ promises of future torments and humiliations. She furiously blamed her weakness in giving this ready sign of submission that would but strengthen the men’s arrogance, but at least looking elsewhere made her less aware of him.
   While the guards were leering at her, thinking about things that she hoped would remain in their imagination, the hooded man had hardly set a foot into the cell. He gingerly avoided the grime and filth that covered the floor, showing his contempt without the need for a face. He never touched her, either. Another wave of humiliation rushed in, both shame and guilt for her filthiness, for the stink that nowadays overcame her natural flowery smell, for the lice that lived in her hair and skin despite the priests’ spells to kill them off regularly.
   The cell stank of sweat and excrements, blood, filth and urine. There was no convenience in the cell, and if nature called, she had to oblige it where she was. She had always been a clean girl, and even so long into this torment, she tried to control herself as much as possible. She tried to suppress the needs. But there were limits to that. She still wished she could brush the worst aside from where she was lying, but the chains prevented that too. Every so often, someone threw some buckets water into the cell and onto its occupant, leaving her shivering and wet for hours, but that only spread the filth around. Mucking out was done only very rarely, and even then consisted of only a brief swipe.
   Once, she had developed some sickness that she knew came from the unhygienic conditions. She had still been stronger then, able to reason better and to realise clearly what was happening. She had to stand quiet when a doctor had come to examine her and used some magic to drive away the illness. He had never even said a word to her to inform her about what was going on.
   “Bring her along”, the hooded man told his guards, not addressing the girl, not mentioning her name, barely even acknowledging her existence as a person. They never gave her anything approaching name, not even to insult her. That much personality was not granted down here. A simple you was all that she was allowed. That was why, when she was alone, she occasionally repeated her name to herself, so that someone was at least saying it, and recognising her as she once was. There was power in names. Hers gave her strength to carry on, and enough reassurance to go to sleep.
   Yet not even her thoughts were fully her own anymore.

One of the guards knelt down and opened the prisoner’s floor-hoop. She had drawn away instinctively from the men, and could feel the cold sweat on her quaking body. She knew that her wide open eyes gave her away, confirmed the men in their position of power and authority, while recalling to her again how much she was in their power, dependent on their mercy. Her body was theirs to command, and she felt her mind slipping too: she heard promises in her head, of freedom, of sanctuary, of revenge against her captors. They were alluring and tempting. But a part of her feared these thoughts even more than the tortures. They were honeyed, but she felt that she would but play the role of the fly if she were to follow them.
   Yet turning away from these promises returned her to the dungeon. If she had been afraid on hearing the footsteps, she was now trembling with impotent fear, desperately trying to salvage what little remained of her pride by suppressing the tears. Gasping for breath amidst her panic, she bit her lips to prevent herself from crying and pleading for mercy, from imploring them to put her back and leave her alone. She could not make herself look up at them anymore, terrified to meet their glances and to reveal more of her own fright. The opened the wall-hoop, and her arms dropped down as she went into the corner and a wild animal’s crouch.
   When one of the guards grasped her hand, she lashed at him. The guard yelped, then cursed at her, and rammed his mailed fist into her belly. After she went down, both guards drew their whips and began beating and kicking her, until she rolled herself up into a ball.
   The robed man turned and ordered them to stop, in an exasperated voice, as if speaking to children. They gave her a last kick into the reins which made her throw up what little food she had been able to consume, and then the injured guard knelt down and grabbed her long hair in a full hand. He took his pleasure twisting it while she was still on the floor, and dragged her upper body back, before forcing her slowly upwards. Her lips were bleeding already from being bitten on.
   When she stood again, the guard shoved her out of the cell door into the dark corridor, lit only by the other guard’s silver-burn torch. As she stumbled forwards, with difficulty finding enough strength in her legs to walk, he shoved her forward with a vicious kick. She gave a shriek of surprise and pain before she could stop herself, and heard their chuckles. Thus she began the walk through the corridors again, in small, stumbling steps as her heavy chains and worn out legs allowed, exhausted by the effort of walking and by the mounting fear alike.
   Once she decided to simply sit there and refuse to move, but the guard pulled her up by her hair again, and shoved her further down on the road to the chamber. Her fright grew with every step she had to take. But nobody was seemed to care.
   It was the eight month since her arrest, though she would not have known this. She had long ago lost all sense for time, and could not tell whether it was night or day. She could not properly remember what those concepts had once meant. They had made sure that everything happened at irregular intervals: the grubby food, the infrequent cleaning, and even the tortures were spaced by anything between two days and two weeks. It confused the mind even while it let the body recover.
   The dungeon even held superfluous corridors by which the prisoners were led to their torments, taking unexpected detours or shortcuts to prevent them from preparing themselves by correctly guessing how long the journey would take. Every time, it seemed longer, fear itself slowing down time to have more of it to increase. Every time, the appearance of the chamber came as a surprise. She prayed it would last longer to get there, and yet knew that this would only built up her fear.
   When they finally turned a corner to see the chamber opening before them, she renewed her weak struggles, briefly finding some hidden reserve of strength and escaping the guards’ hold through frantic movements and limbs grown slippery with sweat. After a few exasperated grasps, they caught hold of her, and flung her forward.
   She sat crouched at the floor of the chamber, down a small set of stairs, where she had landed, whimpering and shaking like a leaf. Her eyes, wide and imploring, rested on the group of men in their robes and hidden faces who were sitting at the pew along the far wall.
   She remembered they did not want to hurt her, and that it was all her own fault by being a bad girl and not obeying them. Then fear and shame made her cast her gaze down again.
   She mumbled a weak ‘please’, and immediately hated herself for it. She could not remember how often she had been to the torture chamber, how many of the torments had been real and how many had been dreams. She knew every part of the room by now, and each spoke to her of pain and fear and shame, and of the power of the men enthroned at the wall.

The central figure stood up asked her a question. She did not understand it. Once, she had been confident, even proud, and had affirmed her beliefs. She had not defended her own actions and opinions, but rather attacked those of the hooded men. Pain and humiliation had eroded that confidence. She had eventually admitted that her beliefs were heretical, simply to get them to stop torturing her. She had even signed the confession in a shaky, illegible hand. But by the time they brought her to the tribunal to make her avow her crimes without the torture, as was required by them to prove her atonement was genuine, her pride had reasserted itself. She refused to sign.
   They had immediately returned her to the torture chambers, until, several sessions later, she had again wept that she was ready to confess. She had given them what they wanted, declaring that she recognised her beliefs to have been inspired by the Evil that lurked in the world. She had admitted that the druidic parts of her faith were corrupting and wicked, that she was in league with lycanthropes and sought to spread the plague again, and that she called on the Darkness in the Flame. She still did not believe that, but if it avoided her the tortures, she would plead guilty to having caused the Mourning. It had shattered most of her remaining self-esteem.
   They had praised her for having signed the confession, but then they had told her that if she truly repented her beliefs, she should show her regret, and seek atonement. She had promised them, meekly. They had shown themselves truly glad about that, and she had tried a weak smile, unexplainably happy at having won their approval, and already believing that the torture was over and that they would let her go.
And then they had asked her to save her soul and life by naming her accomplices. They wanted names. They wanted to know where the lycanthropes were hiding, and who was helping them. They wanted to know whether Oura Gellast was leading the conspiracy, and what its aims and plans were.
   Her hopes had shattered. She had been weak and cowardly, and betrayed herself. But she refused to betray others, and cause for them the same torment she had suffered herself. Part of her wanted to tell them, screaming and flailing within her to make her buy herself free from the terrible torments. She had opened her mouth, facing an expectant tribunal. Then she had lowered her gaze and shaken her head.
   And so they had brought her back to the torture chamber, and subjected her to tortures so furious that she had lost consciousness amidst her screams and an epileptic fit, and she had woken up back in her cell. The tortures had continued unabated after that, ever more painful and terrible. Worse, they were now enhanced by the shame that she had already given in on one point. She had lost her pride. They made sure she was not forgetting how she had betrayed herself, and praised her often for having confessed. All it did was keeping her feel humiliated, and in some bursts of spite, she had yelled at them that she had lied. They regretted her recanting, but had her confession, and urged her to swear off the evil.
   But their efforts at making her reveal the names gave her a strange kind of strength. Their tortures were destroying her, stripping her of every shred of her identity. Yet the names she now guarded were her treasure. They were something her tormentors did not have, and desperately wanted to have, and she could make them suffer by not telling them. As much as the pain, they were a certainty. But one she herself could control. Like a dragon protecting its hoard, she would guard those names.
   She could be the bad girl they believed she was, made her herself almost believe she was. It was almost pouting, but fiercer and stronger, and born out of desperation and stubborn pride.
   Humiliation and pain were her constant companions, and the fear even mere footsteps conjured up in her were beyond any description. She spent her life in misery between sessions of pure panic. Yet every time they shut the door on her after another session of shame and tortures, she knew somewhere deep inside her that she had won a victory. It was a grim, small victory that did not save her from all the other shame she felt, but it was hers.
   The robed man repeated his question, but the girl simply shook her head with the guilty look of a dog who knew he was doing something wrong, but would hope to be excused anyway. She loathed herself for that. But she could not gather the courage to glance up at her accusers once more, and give them the strong refusals she had once launched at them.
   The figure shrugged, and sat down again. He nodded towards the two black-robed men standing in another corner, their faces likewise hidden, though with rounded hood. As they advanced towards her in their grave step, she let her head hang even further, submissive. Still quivering all over, she kept whispering ‘please’, as though they would suddenly have mercy on her.
   They never had shown any mercy yet. They could not. This was her own fault, after all. She was being stubborn, not they. And she kept being stubborn. A part deep within herself, still refused to acknowledge her guilt and wrongdoing. She had always been what she believed was good in a world she believed was worth protecting, even before meeting the Silver Flame. She was simply unable to even consider saving herself by sacrificing others.
   She knew she was defending people, and preventing them from suffering innocently, as the Silver Flame wanted her to. She told the robed men so, and they listened, but told her quite kindly that she was mistaken. That she was deluded even, tricked into saving those who did not deserve it. They assured her they were sorry for her. They understood that she meant well, and was merely misguided. She had tried to defend her friends in many tearful pleas. But they had simply praised her loyalty and deplored it was so misplaced, then asked their questions again.
   They did not want her to suffer, she knew that; but she could not bring herself to betray those names. She recognized all this was her fault, not theirs. She could not quite figure out why, because she knew she was right and was not misguided, but she was still certain that she was to blame herself for her misery.
   When she was in her cell, she kept desperately praying to the Silver Flame to make the men understand. The Silver Flame still gave her faith and strength to believe that eventually, they would simply let her alone, if only because they had given up on her. She could die in peace, and forget about the difficult questions about how she was to behave.
   “Please”, she asked them, desperate for their pity and understanding. The tribunal remained unmoved, save for their spokesperson, who repeated his question about her accomplices.
   “Please”, was all she answered, body shaking and tears running freely now.

She could not remember all the tortures that they had inflicted upon her, and her mind refused to think about them. She lived in constant vague terror that was no lesser for being nameless and general, but she could not, when alone, bring herself to think about them. Her mind went simply blank. She could literally feel it fleeing and cowering before her, and she was ashamed of that sign of her weakness too. Yet when they presented torture instruments to her, the flashbacks came, and she could not stop thinking about them. Pain rose now before the devices were even applied. They knew, and they still presented the torture instruments to her before they were used, as they had done ever since the first session, so long ago that she could not even remember. They did not even have to show her any devices. Any object her eyes fell on in this room, her mind associated with torment and pain, and she flinched at every shadow.
   They were well prepared, and had not applied any instrument that did not hurt. Their tests had established her fey heritage: when they got to the first torture, the knives and needles, the combs and pincers, and the bullets kneaded into the whips had been made from cold-forged iron. So too were the edges of the wooden horses and of the pyramidal wakes, the spikes on the Karrn throne and the Aundairian corselet, and the various kind of screws that could be employed on thumbs, toes, breasts, and, in the case of the Thranish boot, the legs. Some artisan had even crafted a variety of pears, rods, pokers, pincers and claws that had not left a single part of her body unprofaned from the damnable metal.
   They had even found out about her allergy to the spicy thrakel. They had known eating it would cause her to gasp for breath, her eyes to fill with tears, and her skin to begin itching with insufferable rashes. They had forced her to drink thrakel-filled juice until she simply lost consciousness and gone into shock. They had hung her over braziers where she had to inhale the smoke of the spice until her eyes and nose was burning. They had filled her wounds with a salve made from the grounded spice, rubbed it into the most sensitive parts of her body. It would have been a painful torture to anyone, but with her allergy, she had once thrown herself around so fiercely in her chains that she had broken her own arm, before she had suffered a heart attack and almost died in their presence, had their healers not done their outmost to save her.
   Nor did all the tortures leave physical traces. When they had first brought forth the triangular, metal instrument with a large hole for the head at the top, two smaller ones for the wrists a bit further down, and two more for the ankles at the bottom, they had not explained to her what it would do. That alone was more terrifying than their explanations: by then, her mind had kept wondering and imagining, dreading the worst pains. It was only when she had been immobilised for a while in this instrument, knees bent towards her belly and arms fastened in a position of prayer, that she realised for once her imagination had not come close to the real pains. Maddening cramps began in her abdomen and back, and crept to spread to the pectoral muscles, the neck and the legs.
   That was the first time she had constantly yelled out in pain, rather than tried to stifle her expressions to a mere moan. As a result, they had been returning her frequently to this instrument. Not frequently enough to risk it losing its appeal to terror, though. They preferred her to keep being panicked by it.
   This was, she realised with another whimper, what awaited her now. She gathered some brief, desperate energy to fight off that torment, flailing against the two henchmen who held her. Hysterical now, she was screaming shrilly, too panicked to realise the trouble the robed men still had with forcing her down towards the waiting device, and the fact that the two of them were barely enough to lock her into the frame.
   Once the locks were fastened, the torturers stepped back. Their victim was already still squealing frantically, screaming in the mere anticipation of the pain. Her breath became ragged, and she kept yelling at them to let her go, begging them to get her away. Pure, blank panic set in, blotting out everything else. She could not have told them the names even had she wanted to. It eventually gave in to exhaustion, and the girl lay panting on the floor, still whimpering and weeping, waiting in even greater fear than she had experienced hitherto.
   That lasted only a brief while, before she started to first clench her teeth, and then yell again at the top of her lungs. Unseen, the cramps had arrived, and in the frame, there was no way of getting rid of them again. She kept yelling for a long time.

All the while, the tribunal looked on. Clad in ankle-length robes, the seven confessors sat motionless. Gloved hands rested calmly before them, fingers intertwined. They were sitting on a row of thrones, the central one slightly taller than the rest, with a continuous, wooden desk running in front of them. Candles set before them flickered with a silver light, casting shadows over their obscured forms, and projected threatening shades against the wall behind the hooded court.
   Their leader knelt next to the young girl, asking his question, which was nevertheless lost amidst her screams. His voice was not unkind, pointing out that she did not need to suffer, if only she would see her mistakes. The young girl ignored him, clenching her teeth before she returned to yelling in pain. By now, the cramps had taken over not only her torso, back and neck, but were seizing hold of the legs.
   At some point, they threw a bucket of icy water over her, redoubling the intensity of the cramps. Her screams turned so shrill that one of the men visibly winced under his robes. Yet the leader was infinitely patient, and despite her obstinate refusals, he did not grow angry.
   To one side there stood a desk and chair, seating a man in a similar robe, his head covered with a simple monk’s cowl. An identical silver-burning candle glimmered there, providing the illumination the man needed to record all that was spoken and all that occurred in the book that was open in front of him, and which already contained the minutes of previous sessions. The man had been writing calmly through her hysterics, with studious care, dipping his pen into the ink with an easy calm. He had been noting down her begs for mercy, the icy water, and now her desperate and inhuman howls with equal detachment. He wrote down the questions, recorded how often it was repeated and how often an answer was refused. Records were kept of all her pains, the young girl knew, though as she was held in the device even the scribe was too far removed for her to care about him. Mostly, the knowledge would increase her shame, however. It made it that much more difficult to believe her torments would ever be forgotten.
   The girl had been placed in the frame right in the centre of the room, breathing heavily and howling like an animal. The ground beneath her was fouled by water, sweat and urine, and her struggles against the bonds were wild, though nearly imperceptible given the tight restraints. Somewhat later, her howling subsided into a weaker and hoarse but constant whimper, not because the pain was lessening, but because she lacked the strength to stop screaming. It was not as much later as she would herself have thought, though. Truth be told, nobody could be kept in the frame for much longer than an hour, maybe an hour and a half.
   Yet throughout that time, the girl kept pleading eyes glistening with tears on the tribunal, her teeth clenched in a grimace of pain. It was even later when the leading man nodded at the two torturers, and they finally unfastened her. The girl began to jerk on the ground in a macabre dance, gasping for breath and unable to know which part of her body to massage first. Nobody else was providing her any help, waiting for her to exhaust herself by rolling around in the filth and cold water. When she stopped for a while, and the cramps had mostly subsided, the head of the robed men reminded her again that she did not have to do this to herself, and repeated his question. With an extraordinary effort, the girl managed to tell him to go to Mabar.
   The cowled man shook his head, somehow managing to convey sadness despite his masked features. He spoke sorrowfully about how such a curse proved yet again why she was a tainted girl, and that they would regrettably have to continue the torture.
   He gave another sign to the torturers. They stepped forward again, pulling the girl to her knees and wrenching her arms on her back. Her curse had briefly revived her. Whatever part of her still resisted and saw that the torturers were not her friends was temporarily in control again. She managed a token gesture of defiance, jutting up her chin and looking at the tribunal with what she hoped was a strength and determination she was unable to really sustain for long.
   She was still terrified, but for a moment, the fact that she had overcome yet another ordeal without revealing her secret had her pride win over her fear.

   A yank at her arms forced her to stand up. Her wrists had been tied behind her back and attached to one of the ropes that hung from the ceiling. The rope was slowly pulled up, until fire erupted in her shoulders even if she stood on tiptoes. The hooded man stopped the manoeuver briefly, watching her intently while cold sweat began to form on her again. Then, finally he repeated his question, only to earn another curse and a failed attempt at spitting.
   One of the torturers knelt down, and fastened the chains for the weights around her left ankle. Then he jerked her right foot up and chained it against the arms.
   The pulley creaked, and she felt herself lifted into the air. New, raw pain shot through her right leg and her shoulders and arms, pulled the wrong way and threatening to leave their sockets. The weights on her ankle dragged her down, making kicking impossible. Her leg was stretched far beyond her shoulders. She was a very flexible, but even so, muscles were instants from tearing in her thigh. The girl went higher, until she was floating near the ceiling. And again the hooded man asked his question.
   When it wasn’t answered, the girl suddenly found herself free in the air for the fraction of a second, before falling downwards to the floor. Before even the weights could hit it, the rope went taught, her entire body-weight along with the loads at her feet pulling at her shoulders. The muscles in her thigh tore. For a moment everything went red before her eyes. Then black spots danced before them, as she was pulled up towards the ceiling again.
   After a while, when the haze had cleared enough for her to recover just a bit of her forces, one of the torturers took a silver-burn candle on a long pole, and slowly moved it along her body, There was no escape from the scalding smoke and flame, except by pulling upwards. Even as her body tried to jerk away, she knew that this was what they expected her to do. Every motion to escape the flame only increased the tension in her limbs, the already torn leg and the shoulders, straining them even more. All through her own fault and struggles. And whenever she had managed to pull herself up on the unnatural bindings, the candle followed, touching her skin only with its smoke while the flame stood a hair-breath beneath. It was taken down mere instants before she would have slipped down from exhaustion. The torturer was good at taking her measure.
Eventually, she could hear the black man repeat his question, and again she refused to answer, shaking her head grimly and clenching her teeth. Then she fell down again, to be stopped in mid air. After a while the candle was brought again, repeating the same procedure again and again. With each fall, her arms swell more, and the leg muscle tore deeper.
   It was broken up for a bit when the tribunal left her hanging while they went into recess. When they returned, the torture continued as before, and the questions punctuated by whip lashes and drops, until finally she could hear a frightening noise from her socket accompanied by a shock of pain so forceful that the red flash became black, and she went unconscious.

When she came to herself again, she was back on the floor. The arm had been pushed back into the socket, but was swollen and kept throbbing, and the muscles on her right legs were ripped and burning with pain. She drew up into a ball again, cradling herself. One of the men knelt next to her, admonishing her in a kindly voice about how she should not put herself through these torments. He cleaned some of the grime and filth and blood of her and dried her tears with a gentle hand. Then he offered her a drink, which she took instinctively, gulping down several beakers. Yet she refused to speak to him.
   Finally, the man stood up, and shook his head sadly. The leader now spoke more sternly, a parent to a child telling her off for misbehaving and refusing to understand. When that did not receive any reaction either, he gave another resigned wave to the torturers.
   The leader of the cowled men began the usual prayer that always concluded these proceedings, asking the Silver Flame that it might guide the prisoner to the understanding she needed to save herself. His voice had a weary edge to it. Two of his acolytes sprayed her perfunctorily with holy water from the sprinklers.

With little ceremony, the guards threw her against the wall. She hit the wall with a yelp, her arms only halfway up to protect her. She stood trembling on her left leg, the muscles in the right torn and mostly useless.
   Then one of them, she vaguely remembered his face from previous times, grasped her arm and tore her around to face him again. Doing so, he slammed her against the wall, driving the air from her lungs. It was not necessary, but he enjoyed doing it anyway. He glanced at her with eyes that left no doubt about his intentions. She avoided his gaze, and looked down, shaking.
   The men laughed at her distress. They pulled her leg-chains forward and the arm-chains up, anchoring them against the wall again. Then the more daring guard ran his hands caressingly over her body, fondling it, exploring it, and finally rubbing some thrakel-sprice into her. With a last squeeze, he was gone. The girl let herself sink to the ground, sliding past the cold wall, uncaring about lacerating her back on the rough masonry. As her breathing went into violent convulsions from the spice, the second guard tossed some of the bread into her water.
   And then they were gone.
   The door smashed into the lock in front of her, plunging her into darkness again. She jerked in the thrakel-induced spasms for what seemed like eternity, tears streaming freely. For a long time, she felt nearly unable to breathe, panting, dribbling in the throes of the seizure while her eyes felt as though they were popping out of her face. When the spasms of the thrakel finally subsided, the rash remained, and she still felt the look of the guards on herself, even though the men had departed and the door between them was solid wood. Her body was still shaking with pain and fear, the muscles trembling from the exertions.
   After a while, she made a small effort to reach the rope that would bring up the water and foul bread, but her quivering hand had not the strength to pull the rope. Her hands scraped along it, the muscles aching from the ordeal. By now, she was too tired to even care about hunger. Yet even if that sign of weakness still brought with it the inevitable shame, the ignominy of being helpless and broken, of accepting the worst of their humiliations without resistance. That was perhaps the worst torture that could be inflicted on her. She was not a person anymore, merely a wrecked, useless, weak bit of flesh and skin, which did not deserve any better.

There were new footsteps outside now, heralding new tortures and torments. Her heart was beating madly again. She turned towards the wall, and hid her head against it. Afraid, befouled and humiliated, she began to shake again with fear and with weeping. The sounds passed by, but the dread and the shame stayed. After a while, the pain numbed down to a general, unspecific and dull hurt, as her body was too exhausted to put much store in it anymore. Hunger, thirst, and everything else was of no concern anymore, and exhaustion dulled even the shame. At the end of an endless day, she finally wept herself into a troubled, uneasy sleep, praying the Silver Flame that she would never wake up again.

Description

image by dashinvaine
FOOTSTEPS.
   The young girl tried vainly to ignore them, staring ahead into the gloom with glazed-over eyes. Then she began to tremble with sudden, gut-wrenching panic. Cold sweat burst forth on her body, leaving her shivering, and her heart hammered in her head like a stampede of horses. Her breath came uneasily, in frenzied gulps, like those of a stranded fish, grasping, gasping, fighting for air.
   How often had the sound of footsteps, mostly passing by, not even destined for her, caused this terrible, sickening fear she had long lost control over? How many of these sounds had she simply imagined, fear and dread cycling endlessly, leaving no room for any other feeling.
   There was little she could do about the panic but futilely try to blink away unwelcome, unrestrainable tears. Pulling at the restraining chains for support between her spasms, she could but hope with pitiful, frantic despair that this time the steps would pass too, leaving her in peace in the cold darkness of her cell for just a bit more. She could not remember ever wishing for something so fervently, putting every ounce of what remained of her being into it with an obsession that left her shaking with the effort. Her nails dug into her palms, as her mouth moved in a frantic, silent prayer to the Silver Flame: she lacked even the energy to whisper.
   At least, she still kept her faith, though it was a besieged bastion, assaulted by despair and fear; a bastion as small as it was determined to hold out in spite of everything.
   At the turn of a key in the heavy lock she raised a weak head, closing her eyes with the effort even that simple movement involved. Her hopes lay shattered, yet again. She swallowed back the tears of terror that simple sound raised every time someone came in, whether to take her along to some further torment, or merely bringing some of the disgusting, foul food and drink she received at irregular intervals. Instinctively, she wanted to cower in the dirty corner, yet, chained as she was to the wall and the floor, even that little refuge was denied her.
   Yet even after all this time, after what felt like years, she kept enough pride to make pitiful attempts at hiding her fear from the newcomers, to stare at their unseen faces as defiantly as her tired eyes and her body shaking with cold, fear and weakness could. She still managed to defy them, at least for a while, before she had to cast her gaze down again, admitting her defeat and submission.
   She had always been a headstrong girl, and though they had eroded her entire being to a small core of stubborn defiance and desperate faith, and replaced it with shame, humiliation, and dread, she still held on to that little bit of herself. She never managed to stare at them for long. But even when she had to lower her gaze, her inborn refusal of authority had so far kept her from completely giving herself over to them. Instead, she was fleeing into herself, isolating herself from even them.
   She still ached from every pain her body remembered. The wounds themselves had been healed; her tormentors were always careful about not causing lasting damage. But the pain stayed behind, disconnected from the actual physical effects, memories of hurts in places and of kinds that she would never have imagined possible. The pain lingered after the wounds were gone. It arrived even before they were afflicted, at the mere sight of the instruments or even the men.
   A few months ago, she would never have thought that curing magic could be employed with cruelty. But these endless torments had taught her different. All healing magic did now was prevent the body from releasing the soul. It allowed them to prolong the torment, to whittle her defences down until all that remained was a shaking, quivering wretch in a corner, not far from what she was now. In the darkness of the small cell, she was not even sure which wounds had healed, and which were still visible. The simplest movements revived every pain, and there was no position she could adopt that was not hurting.
   All that was nothing compared to the agonising pain newly inflicted every so often on an unscarred, freshly healed body. With cold, slow method, previous hurts were revived and new, even more excruciating pains were called forth. Constantly, they added to the many others that refused to disappear along with the wounds. But even that paled when compared to the fear that preceded such torments, a fear kindled and tended carefully by the explanations that came before each torture. The men revealed sufficient details to give her imagination enough to play with, but left her mind much to make up by itself. They gave her enough time to work her fear up, when they laid out their instruments with casual slowness. By now, they merely had to show her new instruments, without speaking. Her mind did the rest. In her own imaginings, she increased the expected pain beyond any they could actually inflict.
   And the men who tormented her were speaking with such a regret in their voices, that she almost believed them when they said that it was all her own doing. She had begun, for brief instants, to accept that it was her fault, that she forced the men to hurt her because she was stubborn, or even tainted by evil spirits. She knew that by cooperating, she could stop the pain at once. She almost trusted that they pitied her, that they were sorry for her, and that they wished her no evil.
   Her world had been innocent and pure. There had been setbacks before, but she had always been wildly carefree, as fey as her ancestors. Previous trials had always been adventures, exciting and thrilling. She had faced the world with boundless idealism, her life a wild dance and a merry song. That worldview was as shattered now as her body. She could not even remember what singing sounded like. Now she felt the urges to give in and open up to the robed men, the only people in the world. She had to fight off ever more frequent thoughts off thinking of them as parents, kind and caring, and wishing their stubborn girl would but obey them. But somehow, she still remembered how to be obstinate.

Even the simple turning of a key in the lock to her cell was now enough to conjure up the terror fanned by of her imagination. It was not, anymore, a detailed, specific imagination, but a vague assembly of images, memories and fears. She was ashamed of being afraid, humiliated that she reacted so strongly to footsteps passing by outside.
   She was left alone with that shame, too. Nobody blamed her for her fear. She wished someone would, that she might defend herself. Instead, they merely pitied her. She hated it when they did that, because it made her feel even weaker.
   She had not properly defended herself for a long time now. At first, she had struggled constantly against the chains and the pain, answered their accusations with her natural spirit, and given them a few wounds before they beat her down again. She had spit and raged at them, suppressed yells of pain and substituted them with fierce taunts. She had challenged them, for a long time, accepting the tortures with the power of her idealism as another heroic adventure.
   But her spirit had been worn away to a small core, a tiny candle holding against the darkness.
   Now, except when panic overtook her so completely as to give her a strength of its own, she was contend merely to keep the entire amount of her fear from showing. She let them drag her and handle her without putting up any resistance. She even found herself going along with them occasionally, out of resignation and muting despair. She hated herself for that too, felt ashamed and feeble.
   She had refused to scream, in the beginning. Now, even that sound was difficult. She barely found the energy to moan softly, interrupting the incessant movement of her lips in silent prayers to the Silver Flame. Almost automatically, she even remembered to include her sister in them. It was some comfort that her twin at least would live on in that different world above, and she prayed that she would remain in it.

As the door opened, she half hoped that by not showing any reaction they would lose interest in her, that they would simply forget her. That hope was never fulfilled. Those who controlled her world were patient, and never became tired. Unlike her, they were strong, powerful, and enduring.
   Frequently, what she hoped was that if she closed her eyes to everything, she would just not exist anymore. She would spent her time sitting there, hanging from the arm-chains and trying to shut out any feelings. She tried to welcome the melancholy of the realm of the dead. To her, that far plane seemed a paradise. But she was unworthy of being admitted even there, let alone join with the Silver Flame. She could change that, she had been told by the kind fathers. But she was too stubborn to do what was expected of her.
   She still fought against the despair, and tried to turn shame into anger. But it became harder with each day. She instinctively shrank away from the slightest noise. She cowered from the men who brought her food and the rats who stole it from her when she was too weak to prevent them. With the men, she still managed to put up a show of defiance, but even if she had been able to bluff them, she herself could not hide from herself how she had flinched, how much fear she felt.
   And once the cell door was shut, when even the rest of the dungeon was in another world, all trace of defiance left her and the only thing she was left with what the deep awareness of her weakness, her unworthiness, enhanced by the latest experience where she had failed to have any effect on things.

These days, she could not even summon up the power of her mark to talk to the rats. They were mostly hostile and uncaring anyway, occasionally running over her, licking grime and blood that glued to her skin after her tortures. She was too weak to keep them off, and the creatures had the free run of her body. They even bit her when she moved, or just like that; tried to steal her food, and often succeeded. Rats, even lice were stronger than she was, disdaining her in the knowledge that her chains, and above all her weakness prevented her from fighting back.
   She felt worthless, robbed of all that she once had. Most of her talents she could not even remember. The gifts of her heritage, fey and dragonmarked, were stolen from her. She had given up trying. The last few times she had called upon he mark, she had failed to do more than have a faint warmth spread over her neck and shoulder. What connection to the divine she had, safe the very essence of her faith, were stripped off her in an excommunication ritual. The protection of the Silver Flame had weakened, leaving her naked and exposed in front of the ordeals. She could not call on its spells anymore, nor on the rituals of the druids. Her connections to the land itself had been severed, leaving her utterly crippled and even more forlorn.
   Yet somehow, she still kept her mind strong enough to resist their intrusions. At every session before the robed men, she felt their probing thoughts, some seeking to thrust violently through her defences, others seeking to softly insinuate themselves, just as she had once been able to do, when she was still blessed by the Flame. Long ago, one foe had managed to casually read her mind, and bared her family and sister to their attack. Since then, she had learned to close off her thoughts, and till now, she even held firm during the strongest of the tortures designed to make her relent.

The door to the small cell opened inwards. With an impossible effort, she forced herself out of her protective position of hugging the wall. A brief burst of fierce, nearly forgotten rebellion gave her the strength to draw herself up as much as the chains allowed her. Her arms were shackled, the chain between them running through a loop that would have been in her mid-back if she had been able to stand. That feat was prohibited by the other loop, through which ran the chain of her ankle bonds, and which was placed further away on the ground, though not far enough for her weak legs to stretch. Finding a comfortable position was a constant fight. The discomfort made sleep, nightmare haunted as it was, painfully slow in arriving: if the ankle-hoop prevented her from standing, the one on the wall made lying on the floor impossible. Often, she awoke to painful cramps.
   Eating and drinking were likewise troublesome. The former was done irregularly, when one of the guards came in and pressed one of the stale, dry pieces of bread into her hand. It was difficult to chew, and occasionally slipped her grasp to fall down to the floor where here desperate attempts to grasp it again were futile. The rats had even learned to run up her body when she was too weak to resist, and tried to snatch the bread. As for water, they had a pitcher that was attached to a rope, which ran through a loop in the wall beside her. She could pull it up by dragging on the rope, though it was heavy when filled. Dropping it risked spilling much of the water, as did jerking against it. Occasionally, she hid her food in the water. The bread would become mouldy, but easier to chew, and she would not have to worry about dropping it.
   The guards knew what the food was worth to her, and she had to endure much humiliation from them. Fear of the masters of the place, she knew, kept them from raping her outright, and that little certainty gave her some power. But every other form of abasement the guards could devise and invent, she had to bear, along with comments mocking her compliance. Such remarks hit deep. They were yet another demonstration of her worthless nature.
   Her chains did more than just restrain her. They were made from cold-forged iron, anathema to one of fey blood. The touch of the metal wearied her, numbing her senses. No longer could she try a spell, nor change her shape into that of an animal or call upon the magic of her music. She could not summon the dancing lights, nor turn herself invisible, nor clean herself with her innate magic. Worst of all, she could no longer feel Fiontán, and she had lost every sense of her sister. The burden of loneliness was crushing her, weighting heavier than the chains themselves. Her sibling was the only person she could still remember with her last capacity for fondness; everyone else was forgotten, unreal enough that she could not be sure they had ever existed.
   As a result, her show of defiance was achieved by sitting as straight as she could, and staring as boldly at the three men who had entered her cell as her numb head allowed. By the reaction her visitors showed her, she might not have bothered. They gave no indication that they realised there was another person in the small cell. She was merely a feature to be moved around. The girl bit her lips to stop herself from trembling, as she awaited the unavoidable.
   Rimmed in the frame of the cell door, two guards flanked a central figure. This man was clad in black robes etched with silver tongues of flames, his face obscured by a tall, pointy hood that left openings only for the eyes. She dimly remembered that this indicated the robed men were so afraid of their prisoners they dared not show their faces. That thought had given her some strength, once. Yet now, their lack of personality just made them even more frightening, and confirmed her in her loneliness.

The two guards moved to either side of her, both clad in polished silver breastplates and conical helmets, worn above a black uniform. Arm protectors and greaves completed their garb, making them immune against kicks into the shin, as she had found out long ago. Both soldiers were armed with swords, hanging from their side in their sheaths, and one of them held a torch. It burned silver, like all the flames in the dungeon. In the light of the flickering torch, she could see the faces of the guards, their obvious contempt and their hidden lust showing plain upon them.
   She became acutely conscious again of her own nudity. It was strange that this should bother her. She was born and raised in the Eldeen Reaches, where the strangely prudish taboos of the Five Nations were unknown. Many religious ceremonies of the druid cults were carried in out in the nude, and some of the nation’s warriors famously fought naked.
   But the guards managed to thrust their own social conventions on her. Their looks alone made it clear that they saw her nakedness not as natural, but as an invitation. They examined her thoroughly, turning her into an object. And they were in power. She could not avoid adopting their point of view, because hers did not matter. She understood all this, and knew the purpose behind the instructions to strip during the first question, while the assembled hooded men and the guards had looked on.
   Even now, she felt herself blushing under the men’s lecherous gazes, virtually feeling them on her naked skin. She silently cursed herself for that reaction but refused to look down, until one of the men caught her gaze and grinned at her. No, whatever he had planned before, he would not let her go without abusing her some more today. Fortunately, there was the hooded man, who would punish guards who did not meet his high ideals, though he would also punish her for tempting the proud soldiers of the faith with her fey magic.
   For indeed, though she was not overly tall or busty, her beauty was supernatural, and unequalled by any in Thrane. She had always been slender, the ribs showing through on her skin even when she had been able to eat her fill, and her body had gone through physical conditioning. Along her neck, the glittering pattern of a dragonmark lay hidden by the hair, reddish-brown and falling down to over her shoulders. It was unkempt and wild and filthy, but framed a mischievous, fey face with friendly, deep brown eyes.
   It was part of her doom. It drew the attention of the guards, and made her the favourite prey of their amusement. It had earned her even fiercer torture as a punishment for making the hooded men have feelings which they did not allow themselves to have. She was horrified about that concept; she had never flaunted her beauty, never tried to seduce anyone. She had been too innocent, too carefree to even think about that.
   Most of all, it earned her an almost instant condemnation. When the men in the black hoods had found out that their needles did not hurt her, they had tried first silver and then cold iron. That only the latter hurt her was seen as proof incontestable that she was fiend-touched. She had tried to tell them that the fey were not fiends, but to now avail.
   The long time in the prison had only marred her beauty slightly. Magical healing, though applied slowly, meant there were no external signs of the uncounted torments she had gone through. She was thin, nourished just enough to survive and endure the tortures, and covered with grime, filthy sweat and dried blood. Away from the sun, which she had not seen since they had brought her to the tribunal in chains for the first time, her skin was pale. But overall, she still looked a beauty. That too was considered a proof that she was tainted.
   A few tears that had escaped despite her best efforts shone on her blushing cheeks. She finally cast her gaze down under the guards’ promises of future torments and humiliations. She furiously blamed her weakness in giving this ready sign of submission that would but strengthen the men’s arrogance, but at least looking elsewhere made her less aware of him.
   While the guards were leering at her, thinking about things that she hoped would remain in their imagination, the hooded man had hardly set a foot into the cell. He gingerly avoided the grime and filth that covered the floor, showing his contempt without the need for a face. He never touched her, either. Another wave of humiliation rushed in, both shame and guilt for her filthiness, for the stink that nowadays overcame her natural flowery smell, for the lice that lived in her hair and skin despite the priests’ spells to kill them off regularly.
   The cell stank of sweat and excrements, blood, filth and urine. There was no convenience in the cell, and if nature called, she had to oblige it where she was. She had always been a clean girl, and even so long into this torment, she tried to control herself as much as possible. She tried to suppress the needs. But there were limits to that. She still wished she could brush the worst aside from where she was lying, but the chains prevented that too. Every so often, someone threw some buckets water into the cell and onto its occupant, leaving her shivering and wet for hours, but that only spread the filth around. Mucking out was done only very rarely, and even then consisted of only a brief swipe.
   Once, she had developed some sickness that she knew came from the unhygienic conditions. She had still been stronger then, able to reason better and to realise clearly what was happening. She had to stand quiet when a doctor had come to examine her and used some magic to drive away the illness. He had never even said a word to her to inform her about what was going on.
   “Bring her along”, the hooded man told his guards, not addressing the girl, not mentioning her name, barely even acknowledging her existence as a person. They never gave her anything approaching name, not even to insult her. That much personality was not granted down here. A simple you was all that she was allowed. That was why, when she was alone, she occasionally repeated her name to herself, so that someone was at least saying it, and recognising her as she once was. There was power in names. Hers gave her strength to carry on, and enough reassurance to go to sleep.
   Yet not even her thoughts were fully her own anymore.

One of the guards knelt down and opened the prisoner’s floor-hoop. She had drawn away instinctively from the men, and could feel the cold sweat on her quaking body. She knew that her wide open eyes gave her away, confirmed the men in their position of power and authority, while recalling to her again how much she was in their power, dependent on their mercy. Her body was theirs to command, and she felt her mind slipping too: she heard promises in her head, of freedom, of sanctuary, of revenge against her captors. They were alluring and tempting. But a part of her feared these thoughts even more than the tortures. They were honeyed, but she felt that she would but play the role of the fly if she were to follow them.
   Yet turning away from these promises returned her to the dungeon. If she had been afraid on hearing the footsteps, she was now trembling with impotent fear, desperately trying to salvage what little remained of her pride by suppressing the tears. Gasping for breath amidst her panic, she bit her lips to prevent herself from crying and pleading for mercy, from imploring them to put her back and leave her alone. She could not make herself look up at them anymore, terrified to meet their glances and to reveal more of her own fright. The opened the wall-hoop, and her arms dropped down as she went into the corner and a wild animal’s crouch.
   When one of the guards grasped her hand, she lashed at him. The guard yelped, then cursed at her, and rammed his mailed fist into her belly. After she went down, both guards drew their whips and began beating and kicking her, until she rolled herself up into a ball.
   The robed man turned and ordered them to stop, in an exasperated voice, as if speaking to children. They gave her a last kick into the reins which made her throw up what little food she had been able to consume, and then the injured guard knelt down and grabbed her long hair in a full hand. He took his pleasure twisting it while she was still on the floor, and dragged her upper body back, before forcing her slowly upwards. Her lips were bleeding already from being bitten on.
   When she stood again, the guard shoved her out of the cell door into the dark corridor, lit only by the other guard’s silver-burn torch. As she stumbled forwards, with difficulty finding enough strength in her legs to walk, he shoved her forward with a vicious kick. She gave a shriek of surprise and pain before she could stop herself, and heard their chuckles. Thus she began the walk through the corridors again, in small, stumbling steps as her heavy chains and worn out legs allowed, exhausted by the effort of walking and by the mounting fear alike.
   Once she decided to simply sit there and refuse to move, but the guard pulled her up by her hair again, and shoved her further down on the road to the chamber. Her fright grew with every step she had to take. But nobody was seemed to care.
   It was the eight month since her arrest, though she would not have known this. She had long ago lost all sense for time, and could not tell whether it was night or day. She could not properly remember what those concepts had once meant. They had made sure that everything happened at irregular intervals: the grubby food, the infrequent cleaning, and even the tortures were spaced by anything between two days and two weeks. It confused the mind even while it let the body recover.
   The dungeon even held superfluous corridors by which the prisoners were led to their torments, taking unexpected detours or shortcuts to prevent them from preparing themselves by correctly guessing how long the journey would take. Every time, it seemed longer, fear itself slowing down time to have more of it to increase. Every time, the appearance of the chamber came as a surprise. She prayed it would last longer to get there, and yet knew that this would only built up her fear.
   When they finally turned a corner to see the chamber opening before them, she renewed her weak struggles, briefly finding some hidden reserve of strength and escaping the guards’ hold through frantic movements and limbs grown slippery with sweat. After a few exasperated grasps, they caught hold of her, and flung her forward.
   She sat crouched at the floor of the chamber, down a small set of stairs, where she had landed, whimpering and shaking like a leaf. Her eyes, wide and imploring, rested on the group of men in their robes and hidden faces who were sitting at the pew along the far wall.
   She remembered they did not want to hurt her, and that it was all her own fault by being a bad girl and not obeying them. Then fear and shame made her cast her gaze down again.
   She mumbled a weak ‘please’, and immediately hated herself for it. She could not remember how often she had been to the torture chamber, how many of the torments had been real and how many had been dreams. She knew every part of the room by now, and each spoke to her of pain and fear and shame, and of the power of the men enthroned at the wall.

The central figure stood up asked her a question. She did not understand it. Once, she had been confident, even proud, and had affirmed her beliefs. She had not defended her own actions and opinions, but rather attacked those of the hooded men. Pain and humiliation had eroded that confidence. She had eventually admitted that her beliefs were heretical, simply to get them to stop torturing her. She had even signed the confession in a shaky, illegible hand. But by the time they brought her to the tribunal to make her avow her crimes without the torture, as was required by them to prove her atonement was genuine, her pride had reasserted itself. She refused to sign.
   They had immediately returned her to the torture chambers, until, several sessions later, she had again wept that she was ready to confess. She had given them what they wanted, declaring that she recognised her beliefs to have been inspired by the Evil that lurked in the world. She had admitted that the druidic parts of her faith were corrupting and wicked, that she was in league with lycanthropes and sought to spread the plague again, and that she called on the Darkness in the Flame. She still did not believe that, but if it avoided her the tortures, she would plead guilty to having caused the Mourning. It had shattered most of her remaining self-esteem.
   They had praised her for having signed the confession, but then they had told her that if she truly repented her beliefs, she should show her regret, and seek atonement. She had promised them, meekly. They had shown themselves truly glad about that, and she had tried a weak smile, unexplainably happy at having won their approval, and already believing that the torture was over and that they would let her go.
And then they had asked her to save her soul and life by naming her accomplices. They wanted names. They wanted to know where the lycanthropes were hiding, and who was helping them. They wanted to know whether Oura Gellast was leading the conspiracy, and what its aims and plans were.
   Her hopes had shattered. She had been weak and cowardly, and betrayed herself. But she refused to betray others, and cause for them the same torment she had suffered herself. Part of her wanted to tell them, screaming and flailing within her to make her buy herself free from the terrible torments. She had opened her mouth, facing an expectant tribunal. Then she had lowered her gaze and shaken her head.
   And so they had brought her back to the torture chamber, and subjected her to tortures so furious that she had lost consciousness amidst her screams and an epileptic fit, and she had woken up back in her cell. The tortures had continued unabated after that, ever more painful and terrible. Worse, they were now enhanced by the shame that she had already given in on one point. She had lost her pride. They made sure she was not forgetting how she had betrayed herself, and praised her often for having confessed. All it did was keeping her feel humiliated, and in some bursts of spite, she had yelled at them that she had lied. They regretted her recanting, but had her confession, and urged her to swear off the evil.
   But their efforts at making her reveal the names gave her a strange kind of strength. Their tortures were destroying her, stripping her of every shred of her identity. Yet the names she now guarded were her treasure. They were something her tormentors did not have, and desperately wanted to have, and she could make them suffer by not telling them. As much as the pain, they were a certainty. But one she herself could control. Like a dragon protecting its hoard, she would guard those names.
   She could be the bad girl they believed she was, made her herself almost believe she was. It was almost pouting, but fiercer and stronger, and born out of desperation and stubborn pride.
   Humiliation and pain were her constant companions, and the fear even mere footsteps conjured up in her were beyond any description. She spent her life in misery between sessions of pure panic. Yet every time they shut the door on her after another session of shame and tortures, she knew somewhere deep inside her that she had won a victory. It was a grim, small victory that did not save her from all the other shame she felt, but it was hers.
   The robed man repeated his question, but the girl simply shook her head with the guilty look of a dog who knew he was doing something wrong, but would hope to be excused anyway. She loathed herself for that. But she could not gather the courage to glance up at her accusers once more, and give them the strong refusals she had once launched at them.
   The figure shrugged, and sat down again. He nodded towards the two black-robed men standing in another corner, their faces likewise hidden, though with rounded hood. As they advanced towards her in their grave step, she let her head hang even further, submissive. Still quivering all over, she kept whispering ‘please’, as though they would suddenly have mercy on her.
   They never had shown any mercy yet. They could not. This was her own fault, after all. She was being stubborn, not they. And she kept being stubborn. A part deep within herself, still refused to acknowledge her guilt and wrongdoing. She had always been what she believed was good in a world she believed was worth protecting, even before meeting the Silver Flame. She was simply unable to even consider saving herself by sacrificing others.
   She knew she was defending people, and preventing them from suffering innocently, as the Silver Flame wanted her to. She told the robed men so, and they listened, but told her quite kindly that she was mistaken. That she was deluded even, tricked into saving those who did not deserve it. They assured her they were sorry for her. They understood that she meant well, and was merely misguided. She had tried to defend her friends in many tearful pleas. But they had simply praised her loyalty and deplored it was so misplaced, then asked their questions again.
   They did not want her to suffer, she knew that; but she could not bring herself to betray those names. She recognized all this was her fault, not theirs. She could not quite figure out why, because she knew she was right and was not misguided, but she was still certain that she was to blame herself for her misery.
   When she was in her cell, she kept desperately praying to the Silver Flame to make the men understand. The Silver Flame still gave her faith and strength to believe that eventually, they would simply let her alone, if only because they had given up on her. She could die in peace, and forget about the difficult questions about how she was to behave.
   “Please”, she asked them, desperate for their pity and understanding. The tribunal remained unmoved, save for their spokesperson, who repeated his question about her accomplices.
   “Please”, was all she answered, body shaking and tears running freely now.

She could not remember all the tortures that they had inflicted upon her, and her mind refused to think about them. She lived in constant vague terror that was no lesser for being nameless and general, but she could not, when alone, bring herself to think about them. Her mind went simply blank. She could literally feel it fleeing and cowering before her, and she was ashamed of that sign of her weakness too. Yet when they presented torture instruments to her, the flashbacks came, and she could not stop thinking about them. Pain rose now before the devices were even applied. They knew, and they still presented the torture instruments to her before they were used, as they had done ever since the first session, so long ago that she could not even remember. They did not even have to show her any devices. Any object her eyes fell on in this room, her mind associated with torment and pain, and she flinched at every shadow.
   They were well prepared, and had not applied any instrument that did not hurt. Their tests had established her fey heritage: when they got to the first torture, the knives and needles, the combs and pincers, and the bullets kneaded into the whips had been made from cold-forged iron. So too were the edges of the wooden horses and of the pyramidal wakes, the spikes on the Karrn throne and the Aundairian corselet, and the various kind of screws that could be employed on thumbs, toes, breasts, and, in the case of the Thranish boot, the legs. Some artisan had even crafted a variety of pears, rods, pokers, pincers and claws that had not left a single part of her body unprofaned from the damnable metal.
   They had even found out about her allergy to the spicy thrakel. They had known eating it would cause her to gasp for breath, her eyes to fill with tears, and her skin to begin itching with insufferable rashes. They had forced her to drink thrakel-filled juice until she simply lost consciousness and gone into shock. They had hung her over braziers where she had to inhale the smoke of the spice until her eyes and nose was burning. They had filled her wounds with a salve made from the grounded spice, rubbed it into the most sensitive parts of her body. It would have been a painful torture to anyone, but with her allergy, she had once thrown herself around so fiercely in her chains that she had broken her own arm, before she had suffered a heart attack and almost died in their presence, had their healers not done their outmost to save her.
   Nor did all the tortures leave physical traces. When they had first brought forth the triangular, metal instrument with a large hole for the head at the top, two smaller ones for the wrists a bit further down, and two more for the ankles at the bottom, they had not explained to her what it would do. That alone was more terrifying than their explanations: by then, her mind had kept wondering and imagining, dreading the worst pains. It was only when she had been immobilised for a while in this instrument, knees bent towards her belly and arms fastened in a position of prayer, that she realised for once her imagination had not come close to the real pains. Maddening cramps began in her abdomen and back, and crept to spread to the pectoral muscles, the neck and the legs.
   That was the first time she had constantly yelled out in pain, rather than tried to stifle her expressions to a mere moan. As a result, they had been returning her frequently to this instrument. Not frequently enough to risk it losing its appeal to terror, though. They preferred her to keep being panicked by it.
   This was, she realised with another whimper, what awaited her now. She gathered some brief, desperate energy to fight off that torment, flailing against the two henchmen who held her. Hysterical now, she was screaming shrilly, too panicked to realise the trouble the robed men still had with forcing her down towards the waiting device, and the fact that the two of them were barely enough to lock her into the frame.
   Once the locks were fastened, the torturers stepped back. Their victim was already still squealing frantically, screaming in the mere anticipation of the pain. Her breath became ragged, and she kept yelling at them to let her go, begging them to get her away. Pure, blank panic set in, blotting out everything else. She could not have told them the names even had she wanted to. It eventually gave in to exhaustion, and the girl lay panting on the floor, still whimpering and weeping, waiting in even greater fear than she had experienced hitherto.
   That lasted only a brief while, before she started to first clench her teeth, and then yell again at the top of her lungs. Unseen, the cramps had arrived, and in the frame, there was no way of getting rid of them again. She kept yelling for a long time.

All the while, the tribunal looked on. Clad in ankle-length robes, the seven confessors sat motionless. Gloved hands rested calmly before them, fingers intertwined. They were sitting on a row of thrones, the central one slightly taller than the rest, with a continuous, wooden desk running in front of them. Candles set before them flickered with a silver light, casting shadows over their obscured forms, and projected threatening shades against the wall behind the hooded court.
   Their leader knelt next to the young girl, asking his question, which was nevertheless lost amidst her screams. His voice was not unkind, pointing out that she did not need to suffer, if only she would see her mistakes. The young girl ignored him, clenching her teeth before she returned to yelling in pain. By now, the cramps had taken over not only her torso, back and neck, but were seizing hold of the legs.
   At some point, they threw a bucket of icy water over her, redoubling the intensity of the cramps. Her screams turned so shrill that one of the men visibly winced under his robes. Yet the leader was infinitely patient, and despite her obstinate refusals, he did not grow angry.
   To one side there stood a desk and chair, seating a man in a similar robe, his head covered with a simple monk’s cowl. An identical silver-burning candle glimmered there, providing the illumination the man needed to record all that was spoken and all that occurred in the book that was open in front of him, and which already contained the minutes of previous sessions. The man had been writing calmly through her hysterics, with studious care, dipping his pen into the ink with an easy calm. He had been noting down her begs for mercy, the icy water, and now her desperate and inhuman howls with equal detachment. He wrote down the questions, recorded how often it was repeated and how often an answer was refused. Records were kept of all her pains, the young girl knew, though as she was held in the device even the scribe was too far removed for her to care about him. Mostly, the knowledge would increase her shame, however. It made it that much more difficult to believe her torments would ever be forgotten.
   The girl had been placed in the frame right in the centre of the room, breathing heavily and howling like an animal. The ground beneath her was fouled by water, sweat and urine, and her struggles against the bonds were wild, though nearly imperceptible given the tight restraints. Somewhat later, her howling subsided into a weaker and hoarse but constant whimper, not because the pain was lessening, but because she lacked the strength to stop screaming. It was not as much later as she would herself have thought, though. Truth be told, nobody could be kept in the frame for much longer than an hour, maybe an hour and a half.
   Yet throughout that time, the girl kept pleading eyes glistening with tears on the tribunal, her teeth clenched in a grimace of pain. It was even later when the leading man nodded at the two torturers, and they finally unfastened her. The girl began to jerk on the ground in a macabre dance, gasping for breath and unable to know which part of her body to massage first. Nobody else was providing her any help, waiting for her to exhaust herself by rolling around in the filth and cold water. When she stopped for a while, and the cramps had mostly subsided, the head of the robed men reminded her again that she did not have to do this to herself, and repeated his question. With an extraordinary effort, the girl managed to tell him to go to Mabar.
   The cowled man shook his head, somehow managing to convey sadness despite his masked features. He spoke sorrowfully about how such a curse proved yet again why she was a tainted girl, and that they would regrettably have to continue the torture.
   He gave another sign to the torturers. They stepped forward again, pulling the girl to her knees and wrenching her arms on her back. Her curse had briefly revived her. Whatever part of her still resisted and saw that the torturers were not her friends was temporarily in control again. She managed a token gesture of defiance, jutting up her chin and looking at the tribunal with what she hoped was a strength and determination she was unable to really sustain for long.
   She was still terrified, but for a moment, the fact that she had overcome yet another ordeal without revealing her secret had her pride win over her fear.

   A yank at her arms forced her to stand up. Her wrists had been tied behind her back and attached to one of the ropes that hung from the ceiling. The rope was slowly pulled up, until fire erupted in her shoulders even if she stood on tiptoes. The hooded man stopped the manoeuver briefly, watching her intently while cold sweat began to form on her again. Then, finally he repeated his question, only to earn another curse and a failed attempt at spitting.
   One of the torturers knelt down, and fastened the chains for the weights around her left ankle. Then he jerked her right foot up and chained it against the arms.
   The pulley creaked, and she felt herself lifted into the air. New, raw pain shot through her right leg and her shoulders and arms, pulled the wrong way and threatening to leave their sockets. The weights on her ankle dragged her down, making kicking impossible. Her leg was stretched far beyond her shoulders. She was a very flexible, but even so, muscles were instants from tearing in her thigh. The girl went higher, until she was floating near the ceiling. And again the hooded man asked his question.
   When it wasn’t answered, the girl suddenly found herself free in the air for the fraction of a second, before falling downwards to the floor. Before even the weights could hit it, the rope went taught, her entire body-weight along with the loads at her feet pulling at her shoulders. The muscles in her thigh tore. For a moment everything went red before her eyes. Then black spots danced before them, as she was pulled up towards the ceiling again.
   After a while, when the haze had cleared enough for her to recover just a bit of her forces, one of the torturers took a silver-burn candle on a long pole, and slowly moved it along her body, There was no escape from the scalding smoke and flame, except by pulling upwards. Even as her body tried to jerk away, she knew that this was what they expected her to do. Every motion to escape the flame only increased the tension in her limbs, the already torn leg and the shoulders, straining them even more. All through her own fault and struggles. And whenever she had managed to pull herself up on the unnatural bindings, the candle followed, touching her skin only with its smoke while the flame stood a hair-breath beneath. It was taken down mere instants before she would have slipped down from exhaustion. The torturer was good at taking her measure.
Eventually, she could hear the black man repeat his question, and again she refused to answer, shaking her head grimly and clenching her teeth. Then she fell down again, to be stopped in mid air. After a while the candle was brought again, repeating the same procedure again and again. With each fall, her arms swell more, and the leg muscle tore deeper.
   It was broken up for a bit when the tribunal left her hanging while they went into recess. When they returned, the torture continued as before, and the questions punctuated by whip lashes and drops, until finally she could hear a frightening noise from her socket accompanied by a shock of pain so forceful that the red flash became black, and she went unconscious.

When she came to herself again, she was back on the floor. The arm had been pushed back into the socket, but was swollen and kept throbbing, and the muscles on her right legs were ripped and burning with pain. She drew up into a ball again, cradling herself. One of the men knelt next to her, admonishing her in a kindly voice about how she should not put herself through these torments. He cleaned some of the grime and filth and blood of her and dried her tears with a gentle hand. Then he offered her a drink, which she took instinctively, gulping down several beakers. Yet she refused to speak to him.
   Finally, the man stood up, and shook his head sadly. The leader now spoke more sternly, a parent to a child telling her off for misbehaving and refusing to understand. When that did not receive any reaction either, he gave another resigned wave to the torturers.
   The leader of the cowled men began the usual prayer that always concluded these proceedings, asking the Silver Flame that it might guide the prisoner to the understanding she needed to save herself. His voice had a weary edge to it. Two of his acolytes sprayed her perfunctorily with holy water from the sprinklers.

With little ceremony, the guards threw her against the wall. She hit the wall with a yelp, her arms only halfway up to protect her. She stood trembling on her left leg, the muscles in the right torn and mostly useless.
   Then one of them, she vaguely remembered his face from previous times, grasped her arm and tore her around to face him again. Doing so, he slammed her against the wall, driving the air from her lungs. It was not necessary, but he enjoyed doing it anyway. He glanced at her with eyes that left no doubt about his intentions. She avoided his gaze, and looked down, shaking.
   The men laughed at her distress. They pulled her leg-chains forward and the arm-chains up, anchoring them against the wall again. Then the more daring guard ran his hands caressingly over her body, fondling it, exploring it, and finally rubbing some thrakel-sprice into her. With a last squeeze, he was gone. The girl let herself sink to the ground, sliding past the cold wall, uncaring about lacerating her back on the rough masonry. As her breathing went into violent convulsions from the spice, the second guard tossed some of the bread into her water.
   And then they were gone.
   The door smashed into the lock in front of her, plunging her into darkness again. She jerked in the thrakel-induced spasms for what seemed like eternity, tears streaming freely. For a long time, she felt nearly unable to breathe, panting, dribbling in the throes of the seizure while her eyes felt as though they were popping out of her face. When the spasms of the thrakel finally subsided, the rash remained, and she still felt the look of the guards on herself, even though the men had departed and the door between them was solid wood. Her body was still shaking with pain and fear, the muscles trembling from the exertions.
   After a while, she made a small effort to reach the rope that would bring up the water and foul bread, but her quivering hand had not the strength to pull the rope. Her hands scraped along it, the muscles aching from the ordeal. By now, she was too tired to even care about hunger. Yet even if that sign of weakness still brought with it the inevitable shame, the ignominy of being helpless and broken, of accepting the worst of their humiliations without resistance. That was perhaps the worst torture that could be inflicted on her. She was not a person anymore, merely a wrecked, useless, weak bit of flesh and skin, which did not deserve any better.

There were new footsteps outside now, heralding new tortures and torments. Her heart was beating madly again. She turned towards the wall, and hid her head against it. Afraid, befouled and humiliated, she began to shake again with fear and with weeping. The sounds passed by, but the dread and the shame stayed. After a while, the pain numbed down to a general, unspecific and dull hurt, as her body was too exhausted to put much store in it anymore. Hunger, thirst, and everything else was of no concern anymore, and exhaustion dulled even the shame. At the end of an endless day, she finally wept herself into a troubled, uneasy sleep, praying the Silver Flame that she would never wake up again.