Pieces of Eight

Chapter 4

Phoebe was there. She was just standing there. Staring. Blankly, unseeingly. That disturbed him more than when she vanished into thin air, like she'd never even existed.

The walls were moving. That was normal.

His breath was unbelievably loud in his ears. Or was he breathing at all? Maybe this was someone else's breath, and he had already left his body, and now he could hear them.

Was someone touching him? He was in agony either way. But he couldn't move. Or scream. Or even open his eyes. The pain reached a crescendo.

Now there were certainly hands on him. There were voices filling the air. The sensation of being pricked with a thousand needles overwhelmed him. He could feel them crawling and sliding under his skin like snakes, wriggling this way and that the better to jab him with their pointed ends. They were everywhere. He squirmed, he writhed, he twisted, he moaned. He found no reprieve.

The room was stiflingly hot. The sweat dripped off his brow, rolled down his temples, and sank into his hair. He stank with the smell of it: fear and adrenaline.

Phoebe was back. She cocked her head at him curiously, and her mouth opened, and her lips moved, but nothing came out. Nothing but butterflies. Her tawny eyes were expectant. He could think of nothing to say to her. She vanished again.

In her opposite place stood a woman with crimson hair, neatly bundled up behind her head, wearing an elegant, regal dress and standing at an angle to him with her hands folded just beneath her chest, in front of her ribs. Her eyes were sharp and her gaze appraising. He got the sense that she was sneering down her nose at him, unimpressed by what she saw. He wondered if he would ever see her again. What she would look like then.

Areli opened his eyes, and the walls were still moving.

***

With no way to tell time and multiple doses of hallucinogens, Areli found himself very quickly having no clue how much time had already gone by. His captors could hardly be counted on as reliable informational sources, either, as they frequently engaged in roundabout conversation and ambiguous references to ensure his continued ignorance. On some level, he was impressed: whoever had taken him was a knowledgeable and experienced commander and overlord to have instructed them so. On another level, he was even more hopeless. Surely this person was high-ranking, and would therefore be far more difficult to escape from than anyone else. They would also be far more desperate to break him.

Cracking his eyes, feeling like he had sandpaper under his lids, Areli futilely attempted to swallow past his parched throat. By now, he was past hunger: between the repeated pangs of an empty stomach and the even more frequent trauma of torture, his body had set hunger on a back burner. They'd fed him once, and allowed him water once a day if only to keep him alive. Areli had tried to refuse it only once; they'd forced it into him, and the resulting struggle hadn't been worth the attempt for both the pain and humiliation dealt to him in the aftermath.

His heart still set to hammering every time those enormous doors clanged open, though. They'd gotten more and more creative with their punishments as time went on, and Areli had come to fear the sound of the lock grinding aside. It heralded the arrival of another few hours of misery. By now, they'd torn all his nails off, after shoving splinters underneath them. A good number of ribs were broken, courtesy of a clamp-like device that could be gradually tightened on the bone it was set to. Several patches of skin had been flayed from him as well, leaving angry, swollen, colorful patches where only the thinnest layer had been left. His entire body bore the curving marks of a whip, as well as the blue and purple flowers from thorough beatings. They'd left his face and head well enough alone, as they still needed him relatively conscious and physically able to speak, but Areli knew it was a matter of practicality more than any respect for him.