Aithne had stopped counting the days. Not that she had needed to count them in the first place – Merks did that for her.

 

Eleven. She knew it was eleven because Merks knew it was eleven. His thoughts ran on a loop of self-congratulation, ticking off the days like notches on a belt of his own making: eleven days and she's still here. Still mine. I'm so good at this.

 

He was not.

 

It had been a mistake to compare him, even in the smallest of ways, to Sutfu. Merks wanted to be cruel, but he just didn't know how – no matter what he did, he could not seem to cross that barrier that would really let him feast in psychopathic ecstasy. He only played at being cruel; it was just unfortunate she was the toy.

 

He wasn’t like Borkul either – Merks had no idea whatsoever how to systematically break someone’s will. In those eleven days, Aithne had been whipped and raped and prodded and spit on and every other not-really-that-imaginative thing Merks could conceive of. It hurt, of course, but that was it – there was no depth to the torture.

 

The whippings, for instance, were not the creative, calculated things Borkul had delivered. Borkul had known exactly where to strike -- which angles produced the most pain, which intervals prevented healing, how to layer one welt across another so the entire surface of her back became a single weeping landscape of fire that never seemed to diminish. Merks just hit her. Hard, yes, and with enthusiasm, but with no more skill than a child swinging a stick at weeds. The pain was real -- she could not help crying out, could not restrain the tears that sprang unbidden when the lash caught her across already-raw flesh -- but it was stupid pain. Wasteful. It didn't teach her anything, it didn't break her in any useful way. It just hurt, and then it stopped, and then she was still herself.

 

The rapes were similarly unremarkable. He fucked her with the same mechanical aggression he had shown in the Arcanaeum, back when he was just an entitled student playing at being a predator. There was nothing new in it, nothing inventive. Whatever the mask had taught him, he had not learned from his past self's failures. He positioned her, used her, spent himself, and then left her hanging in the chains while he ate sweets and congratulated himself on his prowess.

 

The sweets. Divines, the sweets.

 

He brought food for himself -- plates piled with sweet rolls and candied fruits and sticky pastries that left sugar glittering on his fingers -- and he fed her scraps of the same. She had never longed for a vegetable with such desperate, aching clarity. A carrot. A slice of cabbage. Even a radish, which she has always loathed. She longed for a simple piece of bread that wasn't soaked in syrup and water that didn't taste of the honey residue from his unwashed cup. Even Borkul had fed her proper meals -- plain, yes, but nutritious. He'd had no interest in a slave too weak to work. Yuf’s ragtag band of pilgrims had given her enough to keep her on her feet and even Sutfu had not gainsaid her food. But Merks seemed to genuinely believe that humans could subsist on sugar and spite.

 

And then there was the smell.

 

Aithne had hoped she would become inured to it after enough time, but if anything, it seemed to grow worse. She tried not to think about the puddle of waste beneath her, growing and spreading with each day, because when she thought about it, she could feel her stomach turn and her gorge rise and there was nothing to do about it anyway -- she couldn't move, couldn't clean herself. She could only hang there, suspended by chains that had long since passed the threshold of pain into a dull, distant numbness, and let her body do what her body did. Merks, when he remembered, would splash a bucket of water across the floor, diluting and spreading the mess rather than removing it. He did the same to her -- a cursory sluice of cold water that did nothing but make her shiver and leave her damp and miserable for hours afterward. She suspected he could not smell it - his nose, like his imagination, was simply not equipped for the task.

 

Spending her time not listening to him -- the one positive thing she could take from this experience was that his interminable self-aggrandization had forced her to learn how to shut out thoughts and keep them out, a lesson learned of necessity lest she go mad -- meant she had only herself to hear; somewhere beneath the contempt and the disgust and the physical exhaustion, she found herself thinking. Not the panicked, circling thoughts of the early days, when every creak of the chains or flicker of the brazier sent her heart racing -- those had burned out by day three, replaced by a quieter, more deliberate kind of attention. She had time. She had nothing but time. And so, for the first moment since she had been thrown from the crow's nest of the original Jaunty Spirit, she let herself look backward.

 

She started at the beginning -- the nest, her musings on height and cold, the crash and the careening ice, the green arm surfacing from the water -- and she walked herself through it all, step by step, memory by memory. The cave; the chains. The first time Borkul hit her. The first time he made her kneel. The first time she broke and lifted her head. She let the memories come, painful and clear, and she found she could bear them.

 

Parts of it still stirred something in her – the crack of his voice when he commanded; the weight of him; the way her body had learned to respond before her mind had even finished processing what was happening. She had spent years being ashamed of that -- of the part of her that had wanted, even as she was being destroyed. But here, in the dark, with nothing but time and her own thoughts, she finally understood -- that wanting had not been betrayal, it had been survival. Her body had found a way to make the unbearable bearable.

 

Besides, without it, she would never have been able to love Urag the way she did. She did not dwell on the thought -- she simply let it be true.

 

She passed through Sutfu like a traveler passing a grotesque monument - she marveled at the sheer insanity of him. The philosophy, the careful craftsmanship of cruelty, the way he had turned torture into an art form. She had hated him with a pure, clean hatred, but she also, in a distant and clinical way, found him fascinating – a mind that bent that way was a mind she could not fully comprehend, and she was glad of it. She relived the dragon eating him with undiminished relish.

 

And then her memory reached Urag and Aithne smiled.

 

Merks was in the middle of a rant -- something about ingratitude, about how her suffering was her own fault -- and she didn't hear a word of it. She was in the Arcanaeum, standing in the silence between the shelves, tracing the patterns on the floor with her eyes.

 

Well, eye. She laughed a little – she had somehow forgotten she had only had one eye. Merks noticed her laugh -- his rant cut off mid-sentence, replaced by a snarl and a question she didn't bother to register. When the whip cracked across her ribs, the pain was immediate and bright and she could not help the cry that tore from her throat. But the moment it subsided, she went back to Urag.

 

She remembered his gruff voice and his gentle hands. The way he had refused her, at first, because he did not want to hurt her. The night she had finally convinced him, and the way he had held her afterward. The birth of their son. The way he had laughed -- laughed -- when she told him about the bookshelves.

 

The bookshelves. The moment her life had changed. The moment the magic had come alive around her.

 

No, it was already alive - the moment she came alive and was able to use it.

 

The spark. Tiny, at first -- a flicker of awareness, like noticing the sound of your own heartbeat. And then the cascade. Energy building, swelling, responding to her attention like a hound that had finally found the scent. It had always been there, she just had to...let...it...in.

 

"The true secret to magic," Urag had once said, "is that it is a limitless resource. Its potential is limited only by the imagination of its wielder." It had been his most important lesson, and the one she seemed to forget most often.

 

Magic didn’t come from sensation. Not from feeling. It stemmed from imagination -- from pure belief that it was there, active and willing and able to be molded.

 

Aithne closed her eyes. Merks was still talking -- she could hear his voice, distant and irrelevant, like the buzzing of a fly in another room. She could feel the chains biting into her wrists, the ache in her shoulders, the slow, grinding misery of her body. But she let it all fall away, immersed herself in that moment so long ago.

 

She could picture the swirling energy around her as easily as she could picture Urag, and that was a face she would never forget. It was eager, almost frenzied, like a baby horker waiting for a fish. She thought of how it felt for it to enter her -- like a man, she remembered with a smile, but one she actually invited. It had felt alive and warm as it made a home in her chest. She remembered with a visceral thrill the way it had felt to give it form, to mold it to her desires. And then…the release, more cathartic than the strongest orgasm, leaving her laughing as the world crushed down upon her.

 

She remembered and, in the darkest corners of her mind, she imagined those disparate pieces coming together, link by link, pulling together a causal chain of events that begat events that begat events. Piece by piece, she pictured them happening, in order, just as she remembered. She could feel nothing, but that didn't matter - what mattered was she KNEW it was there and KNEW what it wanted.

 

After all, who could know better than she what it was like to let someone fill a body that felt nothing?

 

She imagined the release; the BOOM of it shook the cave. Dust and stone showered down and the chains shattered, fragments of metal spinning away in all directions, and Aithne fell without transition face-down on the hard stone, her numb arms refusing to catch her, her cheek smashing into the filth-covered stone.

 

She heard a scream, dim and distant, but she didn’t have strength to look. She lay still, gasping as feeling flooded back into her limbs in a cascade of firey pins and needles. She could not move - she could barely breathe. But she could feel the mana -- real this time, present, here -- and she latched onto it with the desperation of a starving wolf. The restoration spell came out a whisper, strained and barely audible, but it worked - strength trickled back, enough of it. The pain in her head eased and feeling returned to her limbs. With a grunt, she pushed herself to her knees.

 

Merks lay against the far wall, the heavy boulder he had liked to sit on smashed into his body. Blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. His eyes were wide, confused, betrayed by a universe that was supposed to have been on his side.

 

"How?" His voice was barely a wheeze.

 

Aithne shook her head and gave him the simple truth: "I don't know. I just...imagined."

 

“That’s…that’s not an answer.”

 

He seemed about to say something else but then a glow caught both their attentions and neither could speak as the figure of a woman, glowing white, eyes ablaze with kindness and dread and love and hate and the highest light of day and the darkness depths of night appeared from everywhere.

 

She stepped toward Merks and said, "Merksandic Sardithal, your vow has been corrupted and your penance has been revoked. By the words of binding, spoken thrice freely by you, I hereby claim my due -- your soul is forfeit. You will be cast to the void to wander in nothingness."

 

"I...what? What vow?"

 

"The vow to serve this woman for all eternity, though worlds should fall and the heavens themselves become sundered. The one you had-have-will make at the altar to my temple 338 days ago and 2,009 days hence, though my priestess had-have-will beg you to reconsider."

 

"But...I don't remember making any vow!"

 

"That is of no import. The vow was made and now has been broken and your punishment will extend to the term the vow was to last."

 

But..." Merks wheezed the words through thin breath, "...you just said that's...eternity."

 

"So it is. Your journey begins now, Oathbreaker."

 

And, in a flash of nothingness, the woman and her light disappeared and Aithne was left alone with her rapidly-beating heart and hanging jaw and disbelieving stare.

 

Merks's corpse stared at nothing, mouth slightly open, as if still trying to frame a question the universe had already stopped answering. Aithne could only stare for long moments, frozen while her brain attempted to understand what she had just witnessed. Finally, it gave up and allowed motor function to resume, and she shut her mouth with a click and moved. Her arms shook and her legs would not hold her, so she crawled to him, looked in those cold eyes for a long moment, then reached up with a trembling hand and closed his lids.

 

Then she sat back and wept.

 

For him? For herself? For the countless versions of this story that might have ended differently? She could not say. The tears came, regardless, hot and messy and long-overdue, and she let them.

 

Seconds or minutes or hours or days later, voices broke through the haze, urgent, sharp, spilling through a door she had failed to notice. Magelight flooded the cave, bright and blinding after so long in the dark, revealing Nyatt's face. Chyehye's. And behind them…

 

Aithne was on her feet before she knew she had stood, stumbling past Nyatt's startled reach, barely registering Chyehye's concerned touch; crashing into Urag's chest, she wrapped her arms around him, buried her face in the familiar warmth of his robe, and wailed. He smelled like books and stone and the faint, clean scent of the soap from his suite.

 

He smelled like home.

 

He made a surprised sound and his hands hovered for a moment, uncertain. Then they settled on her back -- awkward, patting, the way one might comfort a child who had woken from a nightmare. He muttered meaningless words of comfort in her ear.

 

They meant everything.

 

 

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