The sack had somehow rendered me helpless. Paralyzed helpless. I may have toppled over, but I wasn’t sure. I had no sensory input to help work out was happening. I only tried to draw on the power once more. The disorienting display of brights came back with a vengeance.

Then I discovered a couple of other things over the next little while. First the sack was something that Marchenko had devised himself, or so he told me more than once. The only sound audible to me was Marchenko’s voice, and that wasn’t constant. That seemed to be something else he could manipulate. It didn’t matter because I already hated his voice. He had a high-pitched voice that was hard to listen to. I wanted to rip my ears off but had no choice but to listen to his incessant drone when he deigned to talk to me.

I also learned that the cloth the sack was made from had fibres of some metal I had never heard of. Rhodium or something like that. Marchenko wasn’t shy about telling all about rhodium that it interacts with demons and angels in all sorts of ways. The greater demons used it in their prisons and torture rooms.

After the sack got removed it took a while for my eyes to grow accustomed to the absence of light in the room. Even then I wasn’t able to see all that clearly. When you are shackled to a wall in a room that has no windows, it is very easy to lose track of time. When the only break in the monotony is to be tortured to your breaking point, or to watch others be tortured it is madness inducing. Of course that is what Marchenko wanted to do to me, Angel and others. He said he was going to teach me the meaning of pain and agony.

Marchenko had placed us in a large stone room. There were nearly a dozen prisoners in here one of which was an angel. It turned out that I was the only male among the prisoners. At first, he seemed to enjoy torturing me the most. Then he pushed me to the point where I didn’t feel any pain at all when he tortured me. The cat-o-nine-tails had long stopped getting so much as a grunt when he flayed the skin off my body with it. His physical abuse of me didn’t work, but he found something that did.

He ensured we could all hear and see everything when he came to have some fun torturing one of us. While I would that he come to have his fun with me, he knew that wasn’t useful anymore. I am sure the others were thankful it wasn’t them that time. Marchenko had discovered, much to his delight, that he got a huge reaction out of me when he tortured one of the females in front of me. There was a contraption that he put head into that held my eyes open, and my head still. When did things to those women I roared soundlessly and thrashed against my chains to try and break free. I wanted to rip his head off of his shoulders with my bare hands. All I would end up doing every time was biting my own tongue or rip the skin from wrists or ankles. To cause me pain and agony like he had promised he only had to begin to hurt one of the others.

There was one angel that he had so thoroughly broken that she willingly did whatever Marchenke told her to when she was released from her cage. She even went back into that cage when she was ordered to even as she had to sit with her knees up against her chest and head bent down on top of her knees to get into that cage. Marchenko, would occasionally bring her out of that cage to heal the others, even if only a little. It was just enough to keep their physical form from dying.

I knew that in my past life I had done some bad things to people. I only had a vague recollection that I had killed many people and how I had killed them. Many of my victims were women. I didn’t care that any of my victims had died. I was not a good man before. What Marchenko was doing to Angel and his other prisoners made me look like a saint next to him. What had changed and why was I different now?

“Are you having as much fun in our sessions as I am?” he asked once while cackling with glee as he stood there covered in blood and bits of flesh from one of his prisoners.

My eyes just tried to burn holes through him. Even knowing better, I kept trying to reach him, to strangle him, to cave his head in as I bashed it off the floor. I wanted to use that whip he so loved using on him, I wanted to flay every inch of his flesh from his body repeatedly. No matter how much I tried though, it was useless. He was out of reach for the time being, but I watched him and stoked that hatred. The more that hatred for him grew, the more I felt that I had hated someone this much before.

Then his sadism took a darker turn. Marchenko decided he was going to have us torture each other. It was easier for him to make Angel do what he wanted her to. She was terrified of him and what he had done to her in the past. She would do anything she could to avoid that again. In some ways Angel was as mentally broken as the one that spent her time locked in that cage. The one thing he couldn’t make her do was tell him why she hadn’t placed her mark on me.

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All the other demons and angels broke at some point and took to hurting their fellow prisoners to avoid being punished. None of them showed any enjoyment in the acts. Even the demons showed revulsion at torturing the others.

Somewhere in that cycle of being tortured, watching the others get tortured or be the one inflicting the pain I had a moment of clarity, and something Angel had said when we were alone outside the city floated at the edge of my awareness. I had no clear memories of who I had been, who was the one that had made me fall and become a demon. In the empty it wasn’t my progenitor that had found me. I didn’t bear the mark of that demon. I hadn’t been made to remember all those things by that demon.

Angel, and all the other demon prisoners did though. I figured the angels, even the one in the cage remembered the acts that had made them what they are. I knew Marchenko did too. Before his death, he wouldn’t have been any better of a person than he was right now. That revolted me for some reason. That meant that as a human I wouldn’t have liked what he was doing to the others anymore than I did now. Whatever demon had marked him and made him remember his despicable life was off somewhere revelling in the pain that Marchenko inflicted.

It also meant that Marchenko couldn’t put his mark on me. No matter what he did to me, he could never break me. That prerogative belonged to my progenitor. Then I understood he would need to find my progenitor and kill them to be able to break me. For some reason I doubted he had the ability to do that. Especially since I didn’t know who or where that demon was.

The next time he allowed me to talk, I laughed at him.

“You’re nothing but a pile of…” I started to shout at him before he cut off my ability to speak. Just from his posture I could tell he was angry with me. He started to lash out at me with his whip in one hand and a large knife in the other. First, he would snap the whip across my body, the barbed heads ripping gouges out of my flesh. Then he would slice or stab with that knife. My body shook, not with pain as he hoped but with more laughter. It was soundless but an unstoppable avalanche. Each guffaw that he couldn’t hear but he could see, drew him closer to me and to the edge. I didn’t know if demons could be anymore insane though I was well on my way to finding out.

The angrier he got, the more ineffective his attacks were. I only laughed harder. Things got even better when one of the angels started to laugh at him too. Whether she understood what was happening or Marchenko’s madness was spreading I didn’t care. He had seen where I was looking and when he saw that woman laughing at him, he stood still and shrieked.

Slowly all the others were laughing silently at him. All of us, in our shackles or cages laughed at the demon that had somehow snared us all. He had caught us and demeaned us all with the abuse he inflicted, but that didn’t make him better than us. Marchenko wanted to be better than somebody at anything, but here in this room he had devised to inflict physical and mental pain he wasn’t better than anyone.

He was a bully at his core. He was insecure about himself and needed to feel good. You no longer holder the balance of power when the people you are trying to bully laugh at you. The advantage has been lost and there is no way to get it back.

When you are lost in a strong emotion like Marchenko was, you can no longer think clearly. Once you have lost the capability to make rational decisions, you are no longer doing things consciously but instinctively. Some instincts take a lot of repetitive work to build up to the point where you do them without thinking. Its building up the muscle memory, the gut memory of what to do when. You’re training yourself. Other instincts like lashing out at something that has angered or scared you—that fight or flight instinct, happen instantly without thought and you have very little control over them. Again, unless you have spent a lot of time training yourself.

By his reaction, I figured it never entered Marchenko’s mind that he would ever be laughed at while he was a demon. He didn’t know how to handle it, what he needed to do to regain control. He was too far gone to regain control now. His prisoners laughing at him made him worse. The angrier he got, the smaller in stature he became. Even his appearance was powered by his thoughts. In that rage he reverted to lashing out at random, but he lost conscious control of the prison he had constructed to hold us. His whip got caught in one of his other implements of torture, which only fired him up even more. Whatever he done to bind the other prisoners and I started to come undone. The shackles started to fall open. Soon I could hear a couple of the others laughing at him. Then I was free.

I was shot across the room towards him. My anger and hatred fueled my explosion of movement, but I was still in control. I held that rage in check as I slammed into him. My hands were ablaze with black and white fire as I grappled him to the floor. His bellows of rage turned to incoherent screams of pain as I reached for that energy and pushed it through my hands into him. He squirmed underneath me, but now I was bigger than him. My fire burned into him, and I didn’t let up until Marchenko was nothing but a shriveled husk.

My fire wasn’t contained to just Marchenko. Tendrils of fire leapt like bolts of lightning from me to the other angels and demons. None of them were burned the way he had been. They were all lifted off the floor as the fire scoured away wounds and scars that had been inflicted by the dead demon underneath me.

All of them received my mark.