Beneath the purple mist

The demon king goes wild

After close to an hour of torture the girl didn't talk. Not that Aleksei believed she would, he was just amusing himself before he thought of an effective way to break the spy.

"Well.." Aleksei muttered to himself while cleaning his hands of blood "Let's talk for a bit, give you a minute to rest."

He used a spell and a armchair from up in the castle flew in and he sat down in it.

"Do you have someone? Parents? Lovers? Someone you really care for?" Aleksei asked.

"As if I would tell you that." the girl responded but her heartbeat gave her away, it changed it's pace just for a split second but it was more then enough for Aleksei to connect the dots.

"A lover, I see." Aleksei said, more to himself then to her. "Now that I know this, let's have some real fun."

He made eye contact with the woman and before she could close her eyes he managed to get in her head.

It was a spell that was of no good use in battle, since it requiered complete stillness, but in torture it proved to be quite useful.

The spell allowed him to see the person's most important memories, and he could use those to his advantage, but he needed to have something specific in mind, otherwise it would all blurr together.

"Oh, would you look at that. You and your wife both have a high position in Morningstar's ranks. You managed to find an extremelly good warlock who found a way for your wife to get pregnant. How lovely." Aleksei spoke in a calm, even tone.

"You leave them out of this." the woman spat and struggled against her restrains.

"I don't think so. Do you really think that's below me? I would not hesitate for a second to cut out that child from your pretty little wife's belly. I was deemed crazy in my torture methods long ago, and if I was crazy then... just imagine what your wife would think if I showed up at her home. I would make sure to show her proof I had you captive of course."

His eyes had gotten fully black and his voice was far more frightening then any sort of yelling, it was so flat and cold it would send chills through Hades himself.

"Perhaps your ring finger with the ring still on it." Aleksei added. "And then I would carve the child out of her with my bare hands and bring both of their corpses here to you."

"You monster! You could never get close to them. Morningstar protects her people." the spy woman tried to sound sure in her words, but her eyes gave her away once again.

They weren't the eyes of a soldier anymore, they were the eyes of a scared doe cought in the hunter's trap.

"Hm. Maybe a child would've believed you on that. Now, I will be so good to give you five minutes to think. If you don't chose to talk, I will start my countdown. Each half an hour I will bring you a corpse of someone you love until you speak. And if you don't, at midnight I will go into your home, unnoticed, and wake your pretty wife. She will be so frightened she won't even realise who I am. Then I will leave you in this room, tied up with corpses of everyone you love rotting around you as the maggots eat their flesh." Aleksei said, barely a whisper, but it was enough to drain all colour from the girl's face.

A sand clock appeared on the armrest of Aleksei's chair. It was made of metal with green glass details. Details of faces twisted in agony. The sand inside of it fell slowly, at first measuring only five minutes.

Still, the spy woman chose to believe that Morningstar would protect her family and friends in exchange for her silence. The amount of sand in the clock reamained the same but it started falling more slowly, stretching to half and hour.

The moment the first grain of sand fell Aleksei was gone.

He showed up the second the last grain of sand hit the bottom of the clock  and dropped the bloody and disfigured body of her best friend at her feet.

The boy's face and torso were slashed too many times to count, his head split open and his arms and legs twisted in weird angles. The grimace of agony was still on his face.

There was screaming and yelling from the girl, some directed at Aleksei and some at Morningstar, but nothing useful. She just went on and on.

Once the sand in the clock marked another half an hour passing, with her only cursing and yelling and sobbing, Aleksei was gone again.

As he was making his way up the stairs he could hear her yelling for him to come back and to not hurt anyone else, but she did not say she would talk.

Again, once the last bit of sand fell, another corpse was dropped on top of the previous one. This time it was the woman's old and immobile mother.

"Stop! Stop it! I'll tell you anything just stop! Don't hurt anyone else!" she yelled through her tears.

"There, see how reasonable I can be? Truth be told, I did offer you an even easier way to handle this but you made me do all this. Look, I even stained my boots with blood." he said and kicked her in the face with the heel of his boot. "Now, talk before I change my mind, these are one of my favourites so if you don't give me something good I might kill one more just because you made me needlessly angry."

And so, the woman started speaking through her sobbing, she gave away all she knew bit by bit.

The five kinds huddled together at the corner of the hallway could only stare at each other in shock. They knew Aleksei could be brutal, but this was something completelly unhinged.

"It's strange isn't it." Trottler spoke and starteled all of them. "In the past he would never go after friends and family, he would break them without hurting someone else. A loss of someone he loved so dearly chaged the soul of my young king, twisted it and morphed into something entirelly new. It's cruel, how fate can break a young man's mind and turn him hollow. Looking back, it seems like only yesterday I cought him in this very same situation. His mother was the one doing the torture and he hid in this very same corner like you five." he continued to speak absently.

The five kids looked at the poor old man, who looked as if he was watching his own child spiral into inasanity and he could do nothing but watch, and they looked towards the cell where Aleksei was, wondering how far he would go in order to take back the one person that could keep him sane.