looks like a frenzied predator, pleased with the prey lying at his feet.
He tightens his hold on the wire again at the same time that his other hand comes up to pluck a feather from behind me. I flinch at the feel of it, and then my heart pounds in my chest. I felt that, as if the wings were mine, but that’s impossible.
Why the hell did I feel that?
Blood pools beneath my leg, the cuts weeping like they’re begging for relief as the wire digs into my flesh. The back of my leg sticks to the table, and every time another flash of pain hits me, a dawning truth that I don’t want to face digs its heels in.
This is real.
Dr. Ophidian leans forward until his face is right in front of mine. He tsks. “You can make this stop, Sable. We’re so close to Nihil that your wards are already starting to break,” he says, making no sense at all as he twists the dark purple feather between his fingers. “All you have to do is call to your scythe.”
I can’t help the tears that flow freely down my cheeks and drip into my scalp.
“Call it,” he says, but this time, his words once again take on that layered wrongness that I recognize from before.
I don’t know what he’s talking about, but my broken mind is stuttering, and just as he cinches the wire harder, his voice trying to pound into my head, the first tendrils of blackness come over my vision.
Yes.
The blackness always protects me. Shock therapy, intrusive medicine, fights with other patients, unwanted attention from the monsters... As scary as it is to lose consciousness, it’s like an answer to prayers I didn’t even know I was pleading.
As the blackness fades out my vision, I nearly sob in relief. It will take this all away. The darkness will shut my mind off, and I can go far, far away from here.
So when it surrounds me like a giant ocean swell, I don’t fight it. I embrace it with open arms. I’m ready to drown in it. To sink down into inky oblivion where the monsters are just in my head, not all around me, where the monsters aren’t...me.
4
Metal clangs, and if I could control my body, I would flinch against the loud noise. Ophidian screams out in frustration, and I hear the sound of metal objects being thrown around the room in an all too familiar fit of rage.
One thing I’ve learned, he has a horrible temper.
I can’t turn my head to observe his hissy fit though, regardless of how much satisfaction it gives me these days to enrage him. When the blackness comes over my vision, I’m aware of what’s happening around me, but in the black-soaked state I’m in, there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t react, I don’t feel. I’m just a bystander in a frozen vessel, watching things happen to me.
For my whole life, the blackness has played a part. Any time the flickers would become too terrifying, the darkness in my head would spread and wrap me up in its safe, catatonic state. But something down here has altered it slightly. It still protects me, but it’s no longer a curtain I have to work to pull back so that I can see past it. It’s a thin veil now that I’m frozen inside until it subsides. Thankfully, it hides the pain, and it stops Ophidian’s attempts to crawl into my brain and force me to do whatever it is that he’s asking of me.
But I see it all. Remember it all.
Every cut, burn, and beating is cataloged in my mind, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I still have no clue why I’m here, or where here even is. But I’ve had to face some brutal realizations in the time I’ve spent suffering in this place.
One, this is not a nightmare.
Two, this is not a hallucination that will go away.
Three, I am really here, in this dungeon.
Four, monsters really do exist.
And five, I’m probably going to die here.
Since that first time, I’ve been put on this torture table more times than I’ve been able to keep track of. I have no idea when day or night is, no concept of how much time is passing. All I know is, when Ophidian comes to visit me, it’s always accompanied by pain and anger. But as soon as he uses that strange tone of voice, the blackness