And her name is…

I’m chained to the wall. I can’t move more than a hand width from it and it’s freezing. I refuse to take any of the blankets to put between me and it, so I tell my friends that I barely feel the cold even as I shiver. I’m not sure if they believe me or they’re just trying to give me this one. They know how guilty I feel, this is all my fault after all. I’m just glad that they know me answering any of his questions won’t help us.

If he finds out who I really am it will make things a whole lot worse. It’s better that he thinks I’m stupid. I’m sure he has some suspicions, even though he hasn’t said as much. It shows in the way he looks at me like he’s seen me before but can’t remember where.

My chains are long enough on my wrists that I can sit on the floor, and that’s where we all are now. Amelia lays against one of my sides and Josh is on the other. Wilhelm and Gregory lay to either side of them as we try to keep each other warm. I regularly use my claws or teeth to cut myself to give them my blood to heal their injuries that the guards or their leader inflict. I refuse to use any of their titles, they were not earned in my mind, and this unfortunate display of civil disobedience has left me as the most injured tonight.

I can hear Amelia crying apologies into my shoulder, and Josh holds me as tightly as he dares. He thought making them carry out my punishment would break us apart, but it only furthered their resolve. After he spent two hours commanding each of them to hurt me until he was satisfied, he thought he left me unconscious with the guards for the shift change. Them gone gave us just enough time to talk in private.

“I’m so sorry Theo. Please take my energy and fix your arm,” Josh begs into my ear.

I shake my head. “You need it.”

“What if we don’t?” Wilhelm whispers. “They’ll never let us go, and we have nothing to go back to.”

“I told you,” I plead. “I will find a way off this wall and I will clear a path for you. They’ll focus on me, you could take some horses in the chaos..”

“No,” Amelia says firmly. “I won’t leave you behind. None of us could leave you here knowing what you’ll be experiencing… how could we just go and live our lives knowing you could spend a hundred years here?”

Our voices are hushed, even without the guards I’ve heard neighbouring screams and know we’re not alone. I close my eyes as she speaks because I know I’d feel the same way even though they don’t live as long. Even still, I don’t want to suggest their deaths or feed into the discussion. I can almost sense what they’re about to suggest, and the last time someone asked for it it almost broke me.

“We’re already basically are starving, shouldn’t take long,” Josh mutters.

“You know they’ll force feed us, or worse,” Gregory mutters, looking over Josh’s head to see if anyone is coming.

“What are you saying?” I whisper, praying a guard comes down soon as the tears threaten to fall from my swollen, bruised eyes.

Amelia strokes my cheek gently. “Take our energy, take all of it, please.”

My voice breaks before I can speak. They’re all begging me to do this, ignoring me telling them I can’t. They know that a few of the older people in the town have asked this of me over the years. When they were too sick to get better or in too much pain to live, they called me and begged me to end their struggle. Seeing them be born and grow old to kill them myself felt an obscene cruelty, but I couldn’t deny them in the end.

Just like I couldn’t deny them now.

I close my eyes to them, my chest heaving in silent sobs as I nod. “I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry.”

I wish I’d left that man to die, I wish I’d grown my magic like my mom told me to, and I wish we’d stopped celebrating my birthday. What a vain way to die. I can’t believe I allowed such a thing. One complaint and they wouldn’t have thrown me a party. I was the ultimate senior citizen, everyone respected me more than those who looked my age, and if I had said to stop they wouldn’t have made the fireworks. Everything is my fault.

-

A few days later, we wait for the guards to leave before they new team has come down the stairs. It’s time. They lay around me as always, each finding a way to touch my skin so I can begin. I start pulling the energy too quickly and they gasp, so I slow it down, keeping my eyes closed as I cry.They praise and thank me the whole time, and I promise I will find a way to follow behind them.

I can feel them getting heavier on my sides, a problem I hadn’t considered, but it’s too late now. They’re falling asleep and I start pulling energy from the wooden single bed frame we’ve barely used and the hardwood in the floors.I don’t want to be alone.

I’m so absorbed in my task I don’t hear the guards enter until they bang on the bars to my cell. I start pulling energy from everything faster but then I feel a spear stab into my thigh. They don’t realize I’m killing my friends and stab Josh in the back and Gregory through the shoulder. They scream into my ear but I’ve quickly taken enough to knock them out again. I hear the guards fumbling for their keys but it’s almost done, they will be free of this. I feel more pain but energy is entering and leaving me so fast it just joins the other feelings I’m categorizing as excruciating.

I feel the last of their lives enter my body and I want the guards to keep stabbing me so I’ll bleed out but one of them thinks I’ve lost too much already. I feel a thunk on my head before I’m unconscious. I remember reliving that past month over and over in my nightmares, from the day I helped that man to the deaths of the last friends I had left.

When I wake up, it’s to a smell I don’t understand. It’s pungent and thick and I hear the buzz of flies. It burns my nose and I open my eyes to a sight that has me screaming. Amelia, Wilhelm, Gregory, and Josh are still by my sides, covered in flies and rotting from the inside. The smell in the room is of excrement and death, and I start dry heaving with nothing in my stomach.

I do my best to get their corpses away from me, but the length of chain leaves me little room to push them off me. Kheliq is there when I wake up, like he’s been waiting. He disrespects the bodies of my friends and earned the right to a name as I put him at the top of my list for revenge. It’s just me now, and there is no longer the worry of my responses or actions hurting anyone else.

It only gets worse for me from there. We thought the dull beatings with fists and feet were bad, but Kheliq got creative with me on my own. For two days I had nightmares of my dead friends thanking me for their deaths after I ruined their lives, and then I wake up to the rotting bodies still there. On the third day I’m bound in more chains than I weigh and carried awkwardly out of the prison and down dark hallways. I haven’t eaten or fed since our murder suicide attempt, 50% successful, and I’m barely aware of my own body swaying in the low light. When we get to where we’re going I’m tossed into a dark room and a plate with bread and water is set in front of me.

“I hope you like the dark,” Kheliq laughs from door, and then it’s closed.

The room is pitch black and I can’t hear their echoing footsteps walk away.

In the darkness I see all their faces again. Alive and dead, whole and rotten, appreciative and accusatory. They appearances change as often as their emotions and then I see the faces of those that never made it to torture. The darkness becomes my biggest enemy and I only get short times of reprieve when I’m fed and can muster enough strength for a mage light.

The room isn’t bigger than my cell, but in the dark it feels both enormous and tiny. Time here lasts forever and doesn’t exist, and because of this I don’t know how long I was left alone. What I do know is I snapped, and if the guards are to be believed I spent a good portion of time speaking in tongues when they brought me out. I could have very well answered every question Kheliq asked that year, but no one could understand me. I was also returned to this room whenever Kheliq left, and the cycle of insanity to recovery would start again.