Gotchya swirls around the darkness of my mind like a wayward leaf on the wind.
I try to reach out and grab for it so I can understand why it’s floating around, but I miss, and it swirls with other echoing words: you will be quiet and you will come with me.
The orders twist and dance around in my head, while a power I find myself trying to swim through makes my thoughts and limbs feel heavy.
I shove through the bleak darkness of my mind, my body immediately starting to shiver as I start to wake up. There’s a bitter cold seeping into me, and I feel like I’m wading through quicksand as I try to figure out what’s going on.
Rough, cold stone lies under my cheek, and my stomach roils as fear and worry sit like jagged rocks in my gut. The heaviness of those emotions anchors me to the here and now, and I feel the ripples of alarm spreading through my body. It’s as though something scared me so badly that the imprint of it is in my every fiber.
My mouth is dry and chalky, and a barely-there whimper leaks out of my cracked and chapped lips. I struggle to open my eyes, and it takes a moment to blink the blurriness away. As soon as I do, a terrified tear falls from my eye, and I can practically hear it drop to meet the freezing stone beneath me.
Metal bars condense into focus in front of me.
Wherever I am is damp, and dark, and ominous, the very air oppressive. I prepare myself to force my body up so I can separate my skin from the frigid temperatures that are bleeding into me from below, but I’m surprised when it’s not a struggle to sit up.
So my body is okay, but my mind went twelve rounds with Manny Pacquiao. Strange.
“You will call your scythe and sit up if you want this to stop.”
I freeze at the sound of the quiet, menacing voice as it snarls. Something in the tone makes me feel like I have ants crawling through my veins.
My eyes search out the source, and I land on mud-colored wings and the back of a head that’s filled with black dreadlocks.
No. Not dreadlocks, my brain screams at me. Snakes.
Morax.
Terror slams through me, making my chest tighten and my lungs constrict. Frantically, I look around me, forcing myself to see exactly where I am, and my gaze zeroes in on the bars surrounding me.
A cage. I’m in a damn cage.
Biting my lip, I drag my eyes away from the metal bars and see that my cage appears to be inside a large cellar with no windows to speak of, and at the far end, I’m staring right at the back of the Ophidian.
His words are met by silence, and I realize he’s talking to someone else. I can just make out a small, frail looking body on a metal table that he’s standing over. All I can see from my vantage point are legs with lines cut into the flesh all over, leaving behind dozens of blood-red slices. Disgust and anger start to boil inside of me on behalf of whoever this monster is torturing, while horror threatens to burst my heart in my chest.
The word gotchya continues to ring through my mind, and devastation claws up my throat. How did Morax get me? That last thing I remember is staring into Alder’s loving eyes as flowers and plants sprung up between us, and now...I’m here, in this dark, dank room filled with nothing but agony and shadows.
A sob works its way up my esophagus, but I close my mouth and swallow it down. I need to get out of here. I look around for something that will help me, trying to drown out Morax speaking as he continues to issue orders to whoever is on that torture table. It’s clear that he’s getting more and more frustrated every time he’s met with silence. When he lifts his hand up, I catch sight of a long, sharp dagger in his grip, the metal glinting from the lit torches anchored into the walls.
I shiver at the sight of the weapon and the power I can tell he’s pouring into his voice, but it’s not aimed at me, and my body doesn’t betray me by listening to him. Silently, so that I don’t tip him off that I’m awake, I sit all the way up and search for something, anything to