Sofie looked both ways, making sure that the road was fully empty as far as her eyes could see, before rushing across the flat paved surface and into the brush on the other side. She kept moving, as she had all through the night and into the day, memories of eyes filled with betrayal driving her forward.

She’d fucked up. She’d fucked up hard. Looking back now, she should have expected Arlette to fly off the handle. When confronted with a horrible truth like Sofie’s unintended deeds, Arlette was the type of person who would explode in anger first, overreact, and then feel guilty about it later. If Sofie hadn’t run, if she’d just faced Arlette head-on, the Scyrian would have come to her begging for forgiveness a day or two later and everything would have gone back to the way they should be. But Arlette hadn’t been empty-handed; she’d come at Sofie with a knife in her hand and a menace in her eyes. And then there was Gabby, who’d seemed rather upset, and an upset Gabby was perhaps the scariest thing in two universes.

So she’d fled. That choice, and her panicked use of her ability in the process, had reinforced in the others’ minds her guilt. The damage was done.

She couldn’t go back. Not yet. She didn’t have it inside her to face everyone now. She’d grown used to others finding her annoying or overly opinionated years ago, well before her unwanted excursion to another dimension. But she’d never faced outright hatred before, especially not the burning hatred that had helped send her running. She found herself recoiling from just the thought of it.

Maybe that hatred would pass with time. Maybe then, when they’d all had time to think about everything with clearer heads, they’d realize that this was all a huge mistake and find it in their hearts to forgive her.

But first, she had to forgive herself. She didn’t know if she had it in her to manage such a feat. Even half a day later, she couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d done, the list of her sins running through her head over and over and getting longer each time as she remembered another terrible deed.

And so, Sofie continued on. She didn’t have a plan, or even a goal, exactly. All she had was a need to get far, far away, from the people she’d hurt so terribly. Perhaps, if she could do it, she could get away from all people entirely. Then she wouldn’t have to worry about hurting anybody else. Nor would she have to face those that she’d already hurt so gravely. It would be the best for everybody involved.

The land around Wroetin had been almost entirely farmland, the land around the city more fertile than most areas in Otharia—a key reason for the city’s location in the first place. Now, though, after half a day’s travel, the farms had given way to nature in places, a patchwork of farms and brush with the occasional village thrown into the mix. It was good, then, that she’d crossed so much of the most heavily developed area before the sun had risen. The last thing Sofie wanted right now was to be seen.

Barring Blake, Sofie Ramaut was, without a doubt, the most well-known person in the country. Weeks of regular nationwide educational broadcasts did that to you. She didn’t want anybody recognizing her and helping people track her down.

That was, if anybody could even track her down. She’d put a geas on Arlette, Gabby, and Leo that forbade them from trying to find her—a choice she’d made in the heat of the moment that she now half-regretted—but there was still Blake... assuming he woke up... assuming that he even could wake up. As much as he annoyed her, Sofie prayed she hadn’t inadvertently killed him or injured him so gravely that he would be in a coma for the rest of this life.

But if—no, not if, when—he did wake, would he be affected by the geas too? He’d been there at the time, and she’d wanted him included in the whole thing, but he’d been unconscious and hadn’t heard her. Would it matter?

That was part of the problem: even after thinking over everything, Sofie still knew so little about her own abilities. This terrified her.

She knew some likely facts. She knew that she could force people to not do things by using the word “don’t”, forming a sort of geas—an Irish word she recalled from a folklore book she’d read back on Earth meaning “a prohibition magically imposed on a person”, which best fit her understanding of what she did to her victims. She knew that a person who broke a geas would get hurt in some horrible and painful way. She guessed, based on Blake’s behavior and other inferences from other past events, that people who didn’t know they were under a geas would avoid breaking them without even realizing it, like how Blake had tried to avoid contact with her even though he never normally would have cared. She knew that somebody could fight a geas if they knew it existed, but they would suffer just like any others who broke their geasa.

But that was it. That was all she knew. A mountain of unanswered questions remained. And the only way to find out was to experiment on somebody, and that was absolutely not an option.

Could she only create a geas using “don’t”, or did other words also work? Did she even need to speak aloud at all? Did distance matter? Were geasa eternal? Could she create compulsions to force somebody to do something, rather than forbid it? How did a geas even know when its condition had been broken?

All these unknowns formed into a massive boulder in her mind, a boulder chained to her foot and dragging her down to the bottom of the sea. How could she be anywhere near other people when she couldn’t answer anything?

Panting and out of breath, Sofie slowed to a stop amid some chest-high bushes on a shallow hillside. Out ahead of her stretched more farmland and wilderness. She spotted a village of indeterminate size almost straight ahead, too far away to make out details.

To her right, she noticed something off in the distance, something she hadn’t noticed until now. After a few moments of squinting, she realized that she was looking at the raised rail line of Blake’s intercity train system, running roughly parallel with her current heading. That wouldn’t do.

Resuming her trek, she turned away from the railway and continued on through the midday sun. The strong spring rays of the sun cascaded down onto Sofie’s body, but no amount of sunlight seemed to drive away the chill inside her.

----------------------------------------

Fleeing from bounty hunters for days was not something Sofie would ever recommend to anybody, but as she greedily sucked at the stem of a oro bush, she couldn’t deny she’d learned a thing or two from the experience. After weeks of living on the run and living off the land with Arlette, Sofie’s survivalist knowledge stood leaps and bounds above what it had been on her arrival. She was no expert, that was for damned sure, but she evidently knew enough to not die within the first few days of wilderness isolation.

Most of what she’d learned didn’t apply to the plants that grew down in Otharia. Its wilderness was more sparse, filled with low bushes and some small, light forests, as opposed to the oppressive jungles of Stragma or even the dense temperate forests of Kutrad. It reminded her of what she’d seen of Greece back when she’d gone there as a child to vacation with her parents. While Otharia’s climate and environment differed enough from Kutrad to foster its own largely separate ecosystem, there were enough plants that grew across all of Nocend for her to survive for now.

She knew of weeds like the oro bush, which greedily sucked up water and could be used for hydration. She knew about mushrooms, like the showershadow which quickly appeared in the spring after rainstorms, that could be safely eaten, and others, like the one colloquially known as the dead man’s knee, which could kill you with a single bite. She knew how to make a makeshift shelter and a fire to keep warm at night.

She knew enough to get her to where she sat now: in a small forest located somewhere a full day-and-a-half’s travel south or southwest of Wroetin. At least, she believed that to be the case. It had been dark at the beginning and she’d been far too distracted with life-shattering revelations to pay attention to which direction she’d run. Seeing Blake’s railway had helped orient her a bit better, but many hours had passed since she’d moved away from that.

The small fire crackled near her aching feet, its warmth washing over her legs. She could feel it seeping into her, lulling her to sleep. She laid down and closed her eyes.

Iridescent golden eyes gleamed in the darkness behind her eyelids.

Sofie let out an audible gasp, her eyes shooting wide open. She looked around. No time had passed. She closed her eyes again.

The yellow eyes returned.

Sofie’s eyes opened once more. She knew those eyes. She’d seen those golden irises and slit pupils thousands of times before. They were Pari’s eyes.

It would have been easier if Pari had looked at her in anger, but no, those eyes looked sad. She saw not accusation or fury in that gaze, but rather deep sadness and a single, terrible message.

“Why did you kill me, Sofie-sis?” they asked. “I thought you loved me.”

Sofie had managed to hold back the waterworks for the last day, but now they returned with a vengeance. She did not sleep a single minute that night.

----------------------------------------

Sofie shivered as she knelt beside a small pile of damp wood she’d gathered beneath a rocky overhang. A cold front had come through that afternoon, chilling her body and driving home once again the folly of running away without packing first. Now, as she struggled to get the wood to light, she found herself once more beating herself up over her endless stupidity. She could really use a thicker outfit right now, and a firestarter of some sort.

Not that firestarters really existed in Scyria, when every person could magic-up a candle flame at will. Not her, though. It bothered her that she couldn’t accomplish what even the weakest Scyrians could do with ease. Even Pari had been able to make a flame.

Speaking of Pari, the child’s questioning gaze remained, waiting for her to close her eyes again. The sight tormented her, keeping her from slumber. She had not slept since she’d hit her head after falling from the dragon’s hand, now a full three nights in a row.

The lack of sleep was starting to get to her. She even thought she was hearing voices now, as she frantically spun her stick against the wood, which stubbornly refused to do more than lightly smoke. She paused her futile efforts for a moment to take a breather and realized that the voices weren’t in her head after all. Somebody, no, several people were nearby.

As quickly and silently as she could, Sofie crouched against the nearby stone. The rock jutted out into the air fairly low from the ground, creating a pocket of space about a meter high, three meters wide, and three meters deep. Thick brush covered the pocket’s opening, the plants so thick that she’d nearly missed it entirely. They were partly why she’d chosen it as her resting place for the night. Hopefully, they would keep whoever was out there from finding her as well.

“You sure this is the right way?” a woman said, somewhere off in the distance.

“I am,” a male replied. “Gertija said she saw a strange girl enter the woods. Said it looked like she was sneaking around, so that none of us farmers would notice her.”

“Wait, we’re out here in the blighted dark because of Gertija?” the woman bemoaned. “That old crone says she sees shit all the time and it’s never real! Remember when she claimed she saw a woman with a bow hiding in the trees three seasons ago? Load of crap, that was! We spent hours looking. No sign of anything or anybody.”

“I know, I know,” the man reluctantly acknowledged. Their voices were louder now. They were close by. “Still, let’s just look around some, just to make sure. Wouldn’t want to end up like Larenta.”

“What happened to Larenta?”

“Bandits. Killed half of the village, made off with a lot of food and the like.”

“Ah...” the woman muttered, before finding her voice again. “But we’re not tiny like Larenta. We can defend ourselves.”

Sofie held her breath as the pair walked by not more than five meters away.

“You’re probably right,” the man agreed. “But we should check anyway. Can’t hurt to be prudent.”

“...Aye...”

Sofie kept still as the two villagers tromped around the nearby area for what felt like a millennium.

“See? Told you this was a waste of time,” the woman finally said.

“I know, I know,” the man relented.

“Old woman’s half blind, I bet.”

The voices eventually faded, and Sofie let out a long-held breath. Reluctantly, she decided that she would have to forgo any fire tonight, lest it attract somebody.

She still did not want to be found yet. Or maybe not ever. She didn’t know which anymore. She didn’t know anything anymore.

She shivered as the cold seeped into her bones. Sleep eluded her that night, once again.

----------------------------------------

Sofie huddled from the rain inside a small copse out in the Otharian countryside, somewhere. Where, exactly, she didn’t know anymore. Her route had meandered greatly as the days went by, and she could say with great authority that she was now thoroughly lost.

She’d been lost once, back when she’d been just five years old. She’d wandered away from her parents in a park and had spent the next few hours wandering around looking for them and crying. She didn’t mind being lost this time.

Sofie let out a sigh. What would her parents think of her now, wet and miserable, cowering from the rain? How would those thoughts change when they found out that she was a mind rapist?

No amount of rain could wash away the stain. All she could do now was vow to never use her terrible power ever again. Once more, she swore to herself, a dozen times, a hundred times, that she would never, ever use her powers again for any reason.

But was that a vow she could keep when she didn’t even know exactly how her abilities even worked? If her powers activated to more than just “don’t”, then... then just how many victims had she already created? And who were they? She needed the answers to these questions just as much as she dreaded them.

After days spent reviewing her past while she traveled, Sofie could now remember many times when she had likely created a geas, but she knew that the number of times she couldn’t remember had to greatly outnumber that already depressingly large amount. Every single one of the people close to her surely had at least one geas. Then there were the various people with whom she’d interacted since her arrival. Just in her stay in Crirada alone, she must have affected dozens, if not hundreds, of people; the elves, the quartermasters—thinking back now, it seemed weird how she’d always managed to procure more food for the three of them than the standard allotment, even the now-dead General Astalaria. The man had released Arlette from his dungeon far too easily, in hindsight.

That just a small slice of her life. Her initial failure to geas Gabby when she hadn’t really tried gave her hope that geasa only formed from when she spoke with clear intent and conviction; otherwise, the total geasa would surely be in the hundreds of thousands. Still, even if Sofie had to care for it to work, caring was what she was best at! She cared when she spoke to her friends, when she spoke to others she didn’t know, when she was teaching-

The children! How had she forgotten about them?! A spike of frozen dread stabbed into her gut. Her powers were based on the mind or the soul in some way, and Manys served as bridges of the soul. Could she create a geas through a Many? Had she brainwashed tens of thousands of children several times a week? Just her sign-off alone...

“Don’t forget”, her closing remarks had always begun. The children always repeated it. They had surely not forgotten. And the way she’d suddenly felt so drained right after...

“No... no! When will it end?!” she sobbed, her tears blending in with the raindrops dripping down her face.

Sofie curled up even tighter and cried, as she had so much these last few days.

She hadn’t slept a wink the last four nights. Tonight would prove to be no different.

----------------------------------------

Sofie’s stomach groaned as she forced herself to swallow another chewed and pulped purple pipay leaf. She had always loved that the plants of Scyria grew leaves in a variety of colors, rather than just green. The rainbow of hues created by forests across the continent—the green-only Stragma notwithstanding—lent the land an alien but pleasing beauty. That didn’t make them any more appetizing, though. The violet leaves of the pipay bush were edible and had at least some semblance of nutrition inside them. They also tasted like moldy spinach.

Having a superpowered body helped. Sofie did not possess the immense physical talents of her counterparts, but normal people couldn’t go through five days of movement while not sleeping and still move, let alone maintain some semblance of sanity. After everything she’d gone through, she believed that her body was far tougher than a normal person’s body on Earth. She could survive on less food and water, and she had truckloads more endurance than a bookworm like her would ever have had back home. Without that, there would have been no way for her to keep up with the Scyrians during their flight from Kutrad.

The others surely had similarly toughened bodies. The fact that Blake was still alive—assuming he still was alive, given what she’d just done to him—after all the punishment he’d been through was testament to the toughness of an upgraded Earthling body. The stab through the spine alone should have been enough to kill a normal man.

Her stomach growled again, but the hunger pangs subsided for the moment. After harvesting more leaves and tucking them into her pockets, Sofie continued on. Where to, she didn’t know. She just knew that she couldn’t go back.

Not for the first time this journey, Sofie found herself wishing that she was actually the worthless, weak woman that everybody—herself included—had thought her to be for so long. Everything would have been better if she had no powers. But she did have them, and there was nothing she could do about that... right?

A seed of an idea sprouted in Sofie’s sleep-deprived mind. There was a small stream not too far back, where she’d quenched her thirst for a spell. A strange desperate hope slowly filling her, she made her way back to the creek and found a small pool where the water ran slow enough to show her a clear reflection of her face.

Looking deep into her own eyes, with the greatest conviction she could humanly muster, she said aloud to herself, “Don’t say ‘don’t’ ever again.”

Sofie didn’t know if that single word was required for her to use her powers, or if it was just a mental trigger, or what, but all the terrible things she knew she’d done so far had involved it. Maybe if she could shut that off, she could disable all of it.

She let a few moments pass in silence, afraid to lose the hope she’d so unwisely allowed to bloom inside, before taking a small, nervous breath. “Don’t.”

Emptiness filled her and she sank to the ground. It had been worth a shot, but the spiraling sadness she felt now was her just desserts for letting herself get her hopes up. It would have been too easy if that had worked. Too nice. She didn’t get to have nice things in her life.

A high-pitched whine in the distance caught Sofie’s ears, and she turned towards the noise. The sound was far off, coming from somewhere on the other side of a nearby bluff. She didn’t know what the sound was, but she knew it had to be man-made. Perhaps she wasn’t in the middle of nowhere after all?

Curious and hoping to get her bearings, Sofie pushed herself to her feet and headed towards the sound. It turned out to be much farther than she’d thought, but after clambering over three small-to-moderately sized ridges, she found herself peeking over a rock, surprised at what she saw.

The small valley before her was one of the more heavily wooded areas of Otharia that she’d seen so far, or at least it had been. Half of the forest was gone, replaced with a graveyard of craters and tree stumps. A group of ten Otharians busily labored away at the far end of the valley, one team of five using a series of ropes to wrench stumps from the earth while another five half-dragged, half-carried fallen trees towards a large machine closer to her and the entrance to the valley. Though the machine’s form didn’t exactly fit that of what she was used to on Earth, with its large spider-like legs for locomotion, Sofie knew a wood chipper when she saw one. If the gaping maw at the front wasn’t enough to tip her off, the cart mostly filled with mulch on the far side told her everything she needed to know.

At the moment she’d first arrived, the second team had just been approaching the machine. She watched as they lifted the cut end of the downed tree, fed it into the chipper, and backed away with great haste and what seemed like a bit of fear. Something inside the machine latched onto the three-foot-wide trunk and began hauling it in with the gusto of a starving man at a buffet. A loud grinding noise filled the air as the chipper slowly reduced the once-proud tree into little more than a pile of tiny broken pieces.

Sofie continued her clandestine survey of the area. The grinding of the chipper wasn’t the sound she’d heard before, so what had that noise been? In a likely related question, if all ten of the Otharians working here were busy dealing with the aftermath of chopped trees, then who or what was actually cutting the trees?

Sofie spotted the second robot just as it took its oversized chainsaw to the side of another tree down on the far end of the valley. Yeah, that sounded much closer to what she’d heard. She watched in awe at the speed with which the robot’s weapon tore through the wood, the whole ordeal from start to end taking no more than a minute. Its work done, the robot skittered to the side, avoiding the plummeting timber, and then moved out of the way for the second team to come in and begin the process of transporting the tree to the wood chipper. Sofie didn’t know why they didn’t just move the chipper closer, but she also wasn’t a landscaper or a lumberjack so she didn’t want to judge.

This was not the first time Sofie had witnessed deforestation in Otharia; she’d seen it in progress when she’d first snuck in. But that time felt very different. Back then, the Otharians had still been using old-style axes and other manual implements, while one of Blake’s giant tunnel borers had come up from the earth and consumed a large sequoia-sized tree in the farmers’ midst. She remembered the panicked way the Otharians fled when the metal worm first appeared, as if they didn’t know what was happening. There seemed to be much more organization and communication, and less fear than the last time.

Throughout her trek, even as she’d tried to avoid people as much as she could, Sofie had witnessed many signs of change and improvement to the land. New roads, smooth and wide, crisscrossed the countryside. Shiny metal bridges spanned rivers and streams alike. She even spotted a few man-made aqueducts bringing much-needed water to otherwise infertile new farmland.

Minister Upeslacis, that old farmer, had told her once that during the last winter there’d been more food and less starvation than any winter in memory. She’d nodded then, but it wasn’t until these last few days that she’d come to understand the sheer amount of effort Blake, that old geezer, his department, and the Otharian farming community had put into improving the farms in this country. Given the wealth of changes since then, this winter would surely go even better for the people of Otharia.

At least when it came to agriculture, Sofie could not deny that Blake qualified as a net positive for the people here. She’d criticized him on many of the ways he handled governing this land, as well as his act of seizing power here in the first place, but she couldn’t deny that in this one field, he’d done a great job. Food would likely no longer be a problem in Otharia, and that was worth celebrating.

Speaking of food, Sofie’s nose caught wind of something delicious nearby. There was a small wagon not far from the chipper. Her fine eyes spotted, resting inside along with some other items, several sacks that likely contained the Otharians’ lunches. The scent wafting through her nostrils smelled almost divine, conjuring up thoughts of delicious cheeses and exotic spices. Her body was halfway to the wagon, her body ducking behind trees and rocks to avoid being seen, before her mind even realized what was happening.

Sofie halted, crouching inside the nearby brush, as she tried to find her bearings. What was she even doing?! How could she think about stealing some poor laborer’s lunch? Her stomach growled again. She was, admittedly, incredibly famished, having subsisted entirely off of foraging for days now. But still, to take the fruits of somebody else’s hard-earned labor, she couldn’t do that! Could she? It wasn’t like she wanted to take all of their lunches. There would still be plenty left here for everybody to eat, right?

On another day, in different conditions, Sofie would never have even entertained such thoughts. But having not slept for five straight days and having eaten nothing but leaves and roots the entire time, Sofie’s tired and weary mind ended up making a different decision. She resumed her sneaky path towards her first real food since she’d left the gates of Wroetin.

She kept to the forest until the last few meters before sprinting out to the wagon when the time was right and ducking behind it. Nobody noticed her, likely because they were so busy working. Creeping higher, she reached into the nearest sack. The sack held a variety of items. On the top sat several small loaves of bread, with what looked like large pieces of some sort of soft cheese beneath them. Further beneath, she found some other things, like something that looked like a cluster of grapes, only instead of grapes, the fruits on the stems looked more like some sort of olive. The enticing aroma of the cheese from before, mixed with the olive-grapes, filled her mind with anticipation. What would these taste-

A shout in the distance pulled Sofie back into the moment. She looked out and realized she’d been spotted, with two of the men rushing towards her. Grabbing a loaf and some cheese, Sofie took off into the woods as fast as she could. Much to her chagrin, the men chased after her.

Sofie sprinted through the wilderness as fast as her weakened and quickly tiring legs could drive her, clambering up hillsides, pushing through nettles, and dodging exposed roots with everything she had. It wasn’t going to be enough. She could tell from the occasional glance back, as well as the random shouts growing louder, that they were gaining on her. The men had every advantage. They were well-rested, had eaten, had longer legs, and were almost definitely low-level Feelers at the least.

She rushed over another ridge and found herself slipping and sliding down a steep dirt slope a good eight to ten meters high. The dirt, soft and wet from the night’s rain, got all over not just her shoes but also her rear and her back as she went. After skidding to a stop on her butt, she pushed herself up and turned back to see the two men arrive at the top of the slope. She started running again as the one growled and stepped forward, but the other grabbed him, saying, “Stop!”

The man said something a little softer, and Sofie was already running through the trees once more, making plenty of noise herself. “That’s where-” was all she caught, the words and the understanding within tapering off after that. She didn’t stick around to figure out what the rest of the message was. She kept going.

Once she was convinced she wasn’t being followed, Sofie allowed herself to sink down against a tree, panting and wheezing. Some of the cheese had fallen off, but much of it still remained, and the bread looked largely untouched. Without reservation, she took a bite.

Bliss!

She’d feel guilty about this again later, she knew. It was a lot harder to be carefree about theft when you could put a face to the victim. But for the moment, there was just her, the bread, and the cheese, and it was glorious.

Until it wasn’t.

“Well what do we have here?” a voice asked from her left, its proximity disturbingly close.

Sofie let out a squeak, dropping her pilfered food as she scrambled to her feet to face the voice’s source. A man leaned against a tree not more than ten meters away, an unkind smirk on his lips. He wore a set of rugged, worn leathers and had a short, semi-maintained beard. The man didn’t look like he’d been anywhere near a bathtub in months, dirt covering his clothes, his skin, even his long violet hair.

“What’s a little thing like you doing in our territory?” he asked, taking several steps closer.

Between the way he moved and the way he stared at her, Sofie got a startling impression of a snake coming from the man. She backed away from him, her gaze flicking around to look for a place to run while trying to not take her eyes off the creepy snake-like man for a second more than she had to.

“Don’t co-”

Sofie realized what she was doing halfway through and clamped her mouth shut, nearly biting off her tongue. She couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t! She’d promised herself that she would never use her power again!

Sofie knew she was in deep trouble, but that didn’t matter. She’d sworn an oath to herself, and what sort of oath would it be if she broke it at the first real opportunity?

“Stay back!” she called out instead, trying to keep her voice firm and unwavering. “Don’t make me-”

No! Why did this keep happening!? Did she really use that damned word so often?!

“Don’t make you what?” the man leered.

“I’ll defend myself if I have to!” she warned, hoping she could at least bluff herself into a better situation. “You won’t like it if I do!”

“Oh no!” he laughed, stopped in his tracks. “I guess I’d better stand back!”

Sofie blinked. Was he... actually doing what she asked? With a moment of dread, she thought that, perhaps, her ability worked with other words as well. Then something hard hit on her on the back of her head, and everything went dark.

----------------------------------------

“It can’t be her. She wouldn’t be out in this bumfuck place,” a nasally male voice hissed not too far away.

“It’s definitely her,” a female countered. “I saw her on the Many during a recon trip, back when she first started. She didn’t look so skin and bones back then, but it’s definitely her.”

Sofie kept her eyes closed and her body still, listening intently. She didn’t know much about what was going on, other than that her head hurt. It felt like she was sitting on something cold and hard, with the same sort of surface pressed against her back. She didn’t feel anything binding her feet, but her wrists felt like they were bound by a strong, thick, rough rope of some sort. That rope seemed to be attached to something above her, leaving her arms to dangle in the air.

That was all she’d sussed out with her eyes closed in the last minute since she’d come to—that, and the fact that she had a killer headache from that whack on the head. Anything more would come when she opened her eyes. But first, she needed to listen while they still felt like talking about her within earshot.

“We shouldn’t have anything to do with her,” a third, lower voice chimed in. “The tyrant will have his beasts out in force hunting for her. We should have run hours ago. If they find us...”

“They won’t find us. He’s not looking for her at all,” snake-y man cut in. She mentally dubbed him Snake due to the feelings he gave her. “If he was hunting for her, he would have taken her days ago. She never would have made it this far from Wroetin. You’re all looking at this wrong. This is a blessing from Othar himself!”

“It’s dangerous, is what it is,” the nasal voice shot back. “Gonna put us in a shallow grave.”

“You’re not thinking about this the right way,” Snake countered. “This is our ticket out of here.”

“How so?” the female asked, her tone skeptical.

“Best case, if we could smuggle her into Wroetin, or even Keqont or Nont, a proper show and execution could stoke the fires of a true nation-wide uprising. Or, we use her as our way of getting into the resistance, so we could start doing some real damage. Worst case, she stays here while we take our anger out on her, let her feel the pain he’s made us feel, then dump her dead body somewhere far away.”

Sofie barely kept still at the last bit. She fought down the urge to geas them all, reminding herself that she didn’t need to add to her crimes. But still, she needed a plan, one that didn’t end with her dead body lying in a ditch somewhere.

“Worst case, our hole-filled bodies are left to rot as scavengers pick us apart,” mister nasal voice cut in.

“I’m sick of being a bandit, Visvars! I’m not going to let this be how I live for the rest of my life!” Snake growled. “Isn’t that right, Scritt?”

“Y-yeah! Of course, sir!” a young voice stuttered.

Sofie hadn’t expected to hear a voice like that, one that sounded like a teenager, and she found herself opening her eyes before she’d planned to.

Five people sat or stood around a small fire nearby. Snake was one, obviously. Standing tall with his back to her, he faced the others with the swaggering confidence of somebody who knew they were in charge.

The one called “Scritt” was a boy around sixteen, thin and short, not yet a man. He was easily the smallest of the five, and his meek and cowering body language matched the spark of understanding she’d received when she’d first heard the word “Scritt”. Along with those feelings had come a flash of something small darting away at the first sign of danger. She easily saw how the kid got such a disparaging nickname.

A large, heavyset man in his forties sat beside Snake, gazing into the fire. That had to be the low voice from before. Sofie immediately named him “Bull” for his size alone.

Sitting next to him was another man, a little younger, perhaps mid-thirties, who just screamed “slimeball” to Sofie. She didn’t know why, and she knew that judging people by their appearance was no good, but she immediately did not trust him. His eyes shifted about, as if looking for something to pilfer, and his hunched form just made it all worse. Overall, he gave the impression of a weasel, and so she named him Weasel even though he was surely the “Visvars” Snake had been talking to.

Farther back from the rest, leaning against a stone wall of some sort with a bow slung over her shoulder, stood the fifth member of this gang of self-identified bandits and the only woman of the group. Sofie immediately named her “Hawk” because of the woman’s sharp eyes, eyes that looked like that took in everything before them and missed nothing, not even the tiniest ant a dozen meters away. It came as no surprise to Sofie that the woman immediately noticed Sofie’s eyes opening, even in the dim firelight.

“She’s awake,” Hawk said, her voice flat.

“So she is,” Snake noted, turning around. He stepped closer and squatted down to better match her eye level.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“Took you long enough, girl,” he smirked. “If you’d slept any longer, I would have needed to kick you awake.” The man slammed the sole of his boot into Sofie’s gut, seeming to revel in the pained cough she let out. “Now I can just kick you for fun.”

He let Sofie wheeze for a moment, and she used that time to take a large gasp of air.

“Please, this is-” she began, but Snake kicked her again in the same spot, even harder this time. Sofie gagged on her own bile, bringing about a miserable coughing fit.

“Bitches don’t get talk,” he told her. “Did nobody ever teach you that, you Elseling shit? Ugh, just looking at you pisses me off. Scritt, get me some rags.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Sofie caught the look of discomfort on the boy’s face before he stiffened and ran off somewhere. A few moments later, he returned with some cloth. Snake grabbed Sofie’s jaw and powered it open despite her attempts at resistance, stuffing the cloth into her mouth. The rags tasted terrible, and she did her best to not think about where they might have been until now.

“Can’t have you getting too loud out here,” he commented once he’d finished forcing the dirty cloth into Sofie’s mouth.

He turned to Bull. “Make me a thin wedge,” he ordered the large man.

Bull nodded and walked over to a nearby wall and began to pull from it like it was made of clay.

Now that Sofie had a moment where something wasn’t demanding her complete attention, she took the opportunity to look around at her environment. It didn’t take long for her to realize they were in a cave, though the cave looked off to her. Everything was too smooth, and the ground was flat all across the interior. A large exit, wide and tall enough for three or more people to enter side-by-side, was located about fifteen meters in front of her, while a smaller side exit was off to her left.

Looking up, Sofie found that the rope binding her was one single rope led through two thick stone rings above her sticking out from the wall against her back. The discovery made everything click in her head. She’d assumed Bull to be a Feeler for... well, for no reason other than he was a big man, which had no bearing on a person’s talent. But now she realized that he was a stone Observer, of all things. He didn’t seem too great at it, but given time, it was clear he could do plenty. There were even emplacements for torches on the walls, with lit torches standing in several of them. Perhaps this entire cave had been carved out by him, bit by bit?

“Umm...” Scritt asked meekly, “shouldn’t we see if the Resistance wants her unharmed before-”

Snake spun around and backhanded the boy across the face, sending him sprawling onto the smooth floor.

“What did I tell you about questioning me, boy?!” he snarled. “Must I remind you of the favor I’m doing you by letting worthless trash like you even stick around?”

“I-I’m sorry,” the boy stammered as he cowered from Snake’s anger.

“I agree with the kid for once,” Hawk chimed in. “I want to see her suffer as much as anybody, but shouldn’t we check with the Resistance first in case they don’t want her too broken? Seems like a risk we don’t need to take.”

“It’ll be fine,” Snake assured her. “They might not want her cut up, but there are ways to hurt people without hurting them, you know what I mean?”

He took the proffered item from Bull, a thin stone wedge that looked like a miniature doorstop, and picked up a rock in his other hand.

“A friend of mine showed me this years ago,” he remarked to the others, before turning his gaze back to Sofie, anger burning in his eyes. “He’s dead now, slain at the hands of your master, like all the others. This is for him.”

He grabbed Sofie’s left foot, and she suddenly realized where this was going. She gasped through the rags filling her mouth, thrashing about with both her feet as she tried to break free from his grip.

“Come hold her feet down,” he instructed. Bull squatted down and clamped onto her left ankle and foot, squeezing it with a strength that she couldn’t fight. Meanwhile, Weasel and Hawk grabbed her other foot and held it to the floor.

Sofie’s mind raced, as she tried desperately to think of a way out of her predicament. But she could only think of one, and it was the forbidden path. Arlette had proved that actual words were not needed for communication on Scyria, meaning Sofie probably didn’t need words for her powers either.

She could keep it tiny, just some small things like “don’t imprison me” or “don’t hold me against my will”. She could make them forget all about her, and everybody here could just go on with their lives as if none of this had ever happened.

But still, she refused. No matter how innocuous the geas, it was created through mind rape. In a way, doing such a terrible thing to somebody only to put a minor, inconsequential geas on somebody only made the action worse, like killing a baby in order to get a glass of water.

She knew that if she started bargaining with herself like this, telling herself that these were only “mild” geasa and they were okay to do, then that would just lead to worse and worse abuses over time. She’d start slowly widening her boundaries over time, until something like pacifying an entire city “wasn’t a big deal”.

She would not let herself fall so easily. She had a choice: suffer torture or commit even more terrible atrocities. As much as it pained her, the choice wasn’t really a choice at all. Pain was temporary; sin was forever. She would have to persevere. That was all there was to it.

With steady hands, Snake placed the thin front of the wedge just beneath the toenail of Sofie’s left big toe, lifted the rock in his other hand, and brought it down almost gently. The wedge slid under her toenail, ripping it just a bit off of her flesh.

Sofie screamed, her anguished cry muffled by the cloth blocking her mouth. Pain lanced down her leg and into her brain, causing her whole body to spasm. She fought against their grips, but not even a fully healthy Sofie would have stood a chance against their combined strength. The real Sofie, meanwhile, hadn’t been healthy in weeks—not since Pari’s death—and the last few days had made it all much, much worse.

Another knock of stone against stone, and the wedge pushed deeper. Sofie let out a howl, tears streaking down her cheeks as her whole body shuddered. She tried to gasp for air but found her breathing limited to only her nose, her lungs working in overdrive to pull in the air she needed.

A retching sound from nearby, followed by the clear sound of liquid splattering, brought a momentary pause to the proceedings. The four Otharians looked back to find Scritt bent over a small puddle, vomit dripping off the teen’s sad excuse for a beard.

“Seriously?” Bull muttered.

“Oi!” Snake snapped. “If you can’t even handle this, then go out and keep watch! Now!”

The boy scarpered out of the cave, no more prodding needed.

Weasel shook his head with disdain. “Worst excuse for soldier I’ve ever seen.”

The rock fell once more, and agony consumed Sofie’s existence. But deep inside, a plan began to form, a plan that might maybe get her out of there with her vow still intact.

----------------------------------------

The next day, everything lined up for the first part of Sofie’s plan. Weasel and Snake left to go contact the Resistance. Hawk took her bow and went out to scout or hunt or something, and Bull left to... be a lookout? She had no idea, she was just glad he was gone.

Before leaving, Snake had reiterated the need to “keep her intact, for now” to the rest of them. It was then that Hawk had chimed in that this meant that they also needed to “keep their pants on this time” while throwing a pointed look Bull’s way. Sofie didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what that meant.

Only Scritt remained. Somebody had to watch their prize, after all, and as Snake had put it, “even somebody as useless as you can keep a tied up prisoner from escaping”. Scritt was the key to Sofie’s plan. She didn’t know too much about him, exactly, other than that he was the low man on the totem pole, so to speak, but she’d seen signs of humanity in him that the others seemed to lack. Maybe, just maybe, she could use that.

The first hour or so had gone about as she’d expected. He’d sat against the far wall, staring at her emaciated form with a mixture of loathing, fear, and distrust. He kept a small double-sided battle axe strapped to his thin back at all times, perhaps in case he needed to foil her dastardly escape. Eventually, the boy had climbed to his feet and walked into a storage room of sorts to Sofie’s right that she’d missed the day before. He’d emerged a bit later munching on some sort of crackers. Just the sight of the food had elicited a loud groan from Sofie’s gut.

Sofie had remained silent the whole time for several reasons. First, she still had the rags from the night before stuffed in her mouth. Second, she was still in a lot of agony from the night’s torture session. Two of her toenails on her left foot were completely missing, bloody scabs filling in the newly-opened space. They throbbed painfully and constantly, and through them, her whole body throbbed with pain along with every heartbeat. Her torso wasn’t in grand shape either, covered in painful bruises.

The third and most important reason, however, was that she was waiting for the right moment, and this looked like it might be the one. Scritt glanced at her, then at his crackers, then turned around and went back into the storage room. A moment later, he emerged once more with even more crackers.

Sofie made sure to keep still, keeping her body and head as limp and nonthreatening as possible as the boy slowly, warily crept closer, watching her as if she were a wolf caught in a bear trap or something. Once he was close enough, he carefully reached towards her mouth and pulled the ball of cloth out. Sofie let out an involuntary breath and he flinched for a moment, but then he re-upped his courage and reached out again with a cracker in hand.

Sofie’s hands couldn’t reach her head, thanks to the rope binding her, so the boy held the cracker up to her mouth. She bit into the corner, breaking it off and pulling it into her mouth. The cracker was dry, stale, and tasted like cardboard, but Sofie was happy for it anyway. She chewed it slowly, trying to let her saliva moisten it up, except there wasn’t much saliva to be found.

Seeing her parched lips, Scritt seemed to come to the same realization. He left again and returned a moment later with a waterskin.

“Here,” he said, putting the opening to her lips.

Sofie drank greedily, the cool liquid feeling like mana from heaven as it poured down her gullet. After he took it away, she let out another breath and said, “Thank you.”

The boy jumped back, his body tense and ready for a fight. Sofie just stared at him in disbelief.

“What are you doing?” she asked, trying not to laugh at how wary he was acting towards her, the most pathetic figure he’d probably ever dealt with in his life. “Look at me. What am I going to do to you? Bite your finger? It’s not like I can talk you to death.”

He eyed her with suspicion. “Trust not the words of the Elseling, for they speak naught but lies,” he quoted.

Sofie sighed. Perhaps this wasn’t going to be easy. “Well, listen to these lies, please: I basically haven’t eaten any real food in days and I’m starving to death. Please feed me more crackers.”

He squinted at her, suspicious. “Nobody ever wants more of these things. They taste terrible.”

“They do. But if you ate nothing but leaves for days on end, you would beg for them as much as I am right now. Look at me. If I don’t eat, I’ll die, and we can’t have that, now, can we? How would you get the Resistance to let you join?”

That seemed to get his attention. He approached quicker this time and held out the partially-eaten cracker. She took another grateful bite and munched away.

“What’s your name?” she asked after a bit. “It’s surely not actually ‘Scritt’, right?”

Scritt frowned and didn’t say anything.

“My name is Sofie. Sofie Ramaut,” she said after a long silence.

Scritt stood up and walked away, returning to his original spot on the opposite wall. He watched her with a scowl as he munched on his own crackers, waiting for her to pull something evil and Elseling-like. Instead, Sofie just sat, basically unmoving, and watched him back.

“Higo,” he said half an hour later. “My name is Higo.”

Sofie kept her inner grin off of her face. She was in.

----------------------------------------

Bull returned that afternoon, while Hawk came back as the light outside was growing dim. Higo was busy putting up torches for light while Bull started a fire when she walked in. The other two hadn’t returned, but from what Sofie understood, they wouldn’t be back for another few days.

The three roasted a bird that Hawk had shot down and ate it in front of her. She, on the other hand, ate nothing.

After dinner, Hawk and Bull approached her. Sofie saw the wedge in Hawk’s hand and paled.

“Your master killed my sister and my friends,” she told Sofie, her voice dark. She picked up the rags, which had sat undisturbed on the stone ground since that morning, and stuffed them back in Sofie’s mouth. “I will probably never get the chance for revenge against him, but you’ll do.”

Sofie tried to struggle again as Bull held down her legs, but it proved as futile as the night before. Hawk placed the wedge just beneath Sofie’s right big toenail. She raised the rock.

“This is for Kaira,” she said.

The rock fell.

----------------------------------------

“Higo,” Sofie said softly after swallowing a bite of cracker.

Higo froze but didn’t back away this time. Still, he didn’t say anything.

The two of them were alone again, just like the day before. This time, Higo had come out with crackers for both of them from the start, which was progress.

“Higo, I need to know why this is happening to me,” she said a minute later. “I don’t understand anything here. Who are these people you’re with? Why do they hate me so much? What are you doing here with them? Why do they treat you so poorly? Please, help me.”

Higo scowled.

“Please, Higo,” Sofie begged softly. “I’m going to die anyway, right? Please, at least let me die knowing why.”

Higo stayed silent for a while, his scowl never leaving his face. Eventually, he looked back towards the entrance of their hideout for a second before sitting down nearby. “It’s a long story,” he said quietly.

“Aw, come on, please? It’s not like I have anything better to do,” she chuckled.

Higo looked down at the floor, his eyes losing focus. He seemed to think for a while.

As she waited, she just stared down at her feet, now missing two toenails each, the inner two on each foot. The torture the night before hadn’t been any different than the first time, the specific brand of agony no longer new or novel. But that didn’t make it any easier. Pain was funny that way. You could build up a tolerance for it sometimes, while other times it wore you down until you broke. She felt no tolerance yet.

“I grew up in a small farming village southwest of Nont. My family had lived there for generations, or so my father used to say. But he died when I was ten. Mother died two years later. All that we had left was me and my sister. We tried to survive as best we could, working hard in the fields to support ourselves, but the harvests weren’t the best. A few years ago, my sister starved to death. She did it so that I would have enough food to make it through the winter. I was all alone.”

Sofie hadn’t been expecting a sad story like this. She wanted to say something but felt like interrupting would be counterproductive now that he was finally opening up a little.

“I didn’t know what to do with myself when she left me,” Higo continued. “She was my older sister, and she raised me even more than my parents did, especially when it was just the two of us. My life felt empty, and I was miserable anyway. I could barely support myself, and I knew that come winter, I would probably be joining the rest of my family. But then, not long after her death, an Elseling appeared.

“I remember watching the Elseling escape from his execution. Everybody was so afraid. A few days later, word spread that the Army was recruiting so they could better hunt down the Elseling. For the first time in a while, I felt a call again. I was going to join the Army and protect my homeland from evil. It was better than starving to death, at least.”

Sofie couldn’t hold back anymore. “They let a child like you enlist in the Army?”

“Hey, I’m seventeen!” he objected, his head rising to look her in the eye for the first time since the story had begun. Sofie sent him a skeptical look and he deflated a little, his head falling back down to look at the ground. “Fine, I lied about my age. I hadn’t come of age yet, but it wasn’t far off, less than a year away.”

“So, then what?”

“So then I joined the Army. They gave me food and started training me with an axe. I wasn’t very good or very strong, but I was just beginning, you know? Then the Elseling attacked.”

Sofie kept her mouth shut at the mention of that certain someone. Higo would probably have been surprised to learn her feelings about Blake’s actions, but that was for another time.

“He killed the Grand Apostle and all the other leaders. I wasn’t anywhere ready for battle when that happened, but it didn’t matter anymore. They placed me into the Ninth Squad, and the whole remaining Army marched out to defeat the evil that had attacked us.”

The kid’s eyes took on a haunted look, the sort of face that nobody, but especially children, should ever make.

“Everybody died.”

“Everybody?” Sofie repeated with shock.

“Not... ‘everybody’, everybody,” he replied. “But close enough. We used to be proud. The nickname for the Army was ‘the Thousand Legion’ because it was made of a thousand squads, ten soldiers each. They even made sure to teach me how to count, so that I could properly count all the squads and understand just how large and grand we were. There were over nine hundred squads that made it to the battle. We felt confident in victory. I don’t know how many people survived, but it couldn’t have been more than one or two hundred.

“The Elseling’s demons tore us apart. There was nothing we could do to stop them. Even when the leaders used Othar’s Blessing, they couldn’t hold on. It was...”

He was shivering now, and Sofie wanted to reach out and hug him or pat his shoulder or something, but she couldn’t do more than listen.

“I was so afraid. I ran. I ran and I ran. I didn’t come back until it was all over. Bodies were piled up everywhere, blood... there was so much...” The boy looked like he was about to puke from the memory alone, but after a moment, he seemed to steady. “Somehow, half of the Ninth Squad survived. Ketrina, Visvars, Holgers, Armans, and me.”

“That’s the other people here? The remnants of the Ninth Squad?”

“Yeah... Ketrina is the scout. Holgers was on the front lines. Visvars worked behind the lines. Armans was the vice-captain. The captain died. Pretty much all of people they knew died too. Ketrina’s sister, Holgers’s friends. Everybody.”

Sofie decided to keep calling them by her nicknames for them—Snake, Hawk, etcetera. Those names fit better in her mind.

“I was a coward. I abandoned my people.”

“Is that why they call you ‘Scritt’? What even is a scritt?”

He sighed. “A scritt is a tiny lizard that lives under rocks. They run away and hide from absolutely everything, no matter how dangerous it might be. Armans started calling me that when I came back after the battle.

“I thought they were going to kill me. Maybe they should have. But they didn’t. They let me stay and we all ran. We ran from the Elseling and we hid.”

“And that’s how you ended up here?”

“We can’t go back. Your master would kill us. Armans says he’s hunting for us even now. So we became bandits. I didn’t know what to do, but Armans said he could make me into a real man and a real soldier, so I came along.”

Sofie wanted to roll her eyes. It felt like Snake just wanted somebody to bully and lord over. “And how’s that going for you?” she asked.

“Fine,” he answered defensively. His story over, Higo went back to his usual watching place and watched her, making sure she didn’t pull any evil Elseling tricks.

“I’m sorry that all those people died,” she said after a moment of quiet.

“Why would you care? You’re an Elseling,” he pointed out, his voice cold.

“That doesn’t mean I can’t care about other people,” she told him, despondent. “I don’t care who it is, I don’t want anybody to die. This world has far too much death and suffering already. We don’t need to add senseless violence on top of everything else.”

Higo didn’t give more than a soft grunt. Sofie, for her part, didn’t feel like saying or doing much of anything anymore.

“Hey,” she said a few hours later, “what was your sister’s name?”

“Vika.”

“She sounded like a good sister. A better one than I was.”

“She was the best.”

----------------------------------------

Bull didn’t say anything. He didn’t talk about friends or family. He just got the wedge and went to work.

Within moments, the wounds in Sofie’s mind were ripped open once more. It felt worse than the last time. Each tap was like a sledgehammer in her mind, pounding at the rock that was her willpower. Cracks were forming. She held on.

----------------------------------------

“What’s it like, being a bandit?”

Higo stiffened. “What do you mean?”

“Like... what would you be doing if I hadn’t appeared?”

“We don’t do that much, really,” Higo admitted. “We search the woods, rob merchants, raid villages, that sort of thing.”

“Raid villages? Didn’t you join the Army to protect the people in those villages? And now you’re attacking them yourself?”

“Shut up!” he blurted out. “It’s not like this is what I wanted!”

Dropping the crackers by her feet, he stood up and stormed over to the other side of the cave before slumping down against the wall.

“Have they taken you on raids?” Sofie asked.

Higo just glared at her angrily.

“Have you killed anybody?”

The glare intensified.

“How many people have you killed?”

“How many people have you killed, you blasted Elseling?!” he shot back.

Sofie’s face fell. “I don’t know,” she admitted.

Higo’s face twisted in anger. “Don’t know?! How can you not know?!” He took on that look that Sofie had come to recognize as his ‘barely holding down vomit’ face. “It’s impossible to forget their faces... Unless...” He eyed her like a rabbit eyes a wolf. “...you killed so many you lost count...”

“No, no, you don’t understand,” Sofie explained. “I have never stabbed a person with a knife. I have never sliced somebody to death with a sword, or chopped them with an axe. I have never shot somebody with a bow, or even with one of Lord Ferros’s demons, as you so call them. But still...”

“Then why didn’t you just say ‘zero’?” he pressed her, still looking queasy.

Sofie thought for a moment for a way to explain her troubles without actually explaining her troubles. “What if you didn’t know how to fight, and I taught you how to fight, but I did it badly. If you then went out and got killed in a battle because I taught you wrong, did I kill you by being a bad teacher?”

“Huh?” he replied, looking at her like she’d started speaking in tongues.

“Look, it’s complicated, alright? I can’t really think of a good analogy on the spot,” she groaned. “I’m just saying, if I trained you to be in the Army but I don’t teach you everything you need to know, like all the proper signals maybe, and you run out onto that battlefield for your first battle, and because you don’t even know the signals you end up all alone and you take an arrow in your heart and die... wouldn’t that be my fault? Wouldn’t I have killed you because I didn’t teach you what you needed to know?”

“I think I get what you’re saying, maybe,” Higo said as he scratched his head. “But, I mean, the person who killed me would be the archer who shot me, not you, even if you did a bad job.”

“But if I had not taught you at all, you would not have been in the battle in the first place. I put you in a position where you would fail because I did poorly.”

“I... guess?” Higo reluctantly agreed, though he didn’t seem entirely convinced. “So you’re saying you taught people to fight badly? I don’t think I can see you teaching anybody to fight anything.”

Sofie snorted. “That was just a hypothetical. But it’s closer than I want to admit. I have... touched a lot of lives since I came to this place. And a lot of those people have gone their own way since and I’ll likely never see or hear from them ever again, and they might already be dead for all I know. And there’s a chance, a larger chance than I want to admit, that if they are dead, it’s because they met me.”

“That sounds like a load of shit to me,” Higo sniffed. “People are responsible for themselves. You’re talking like that, and you don’t even know anybody who died because of you.”

Sofie let out a defeated sigh, her gaze falling back to her feet and their scabbed toes.

“No, I said I don’t know how many, because there might be many. But I do know one person who died because of me. My little sister.”

Sofie tried not to cry, but the tears came anyway. They always did when she thought about Pari, even after this long.

“She was the best person I ever knew. The light of my life. And because of what I taught her, what I told her, she died in my arms.”

“I’m... sorry,” Higo said. It sounded like he meant it, too.

It was time to set down the bait.

“Her name was Pari. It’s been horrible ever since she died. Every day feels dark and hopeless. You know what it’s like.”

“Yeah,” Higo sighed.

“I just tell myself that it’s all going to be okay. That everything will be alright once we bring her back to life. That’s how I get through each day. I’ll see her again soon. It will be wonderful. I’ll hug her until the end of time. I’m never letting her go ever again.”

It took Higo a moment to notice what exactly she’d said. She watched out of the corner of her eye, trying to make sure he didn’t see her looking, as he went from sad to stunned to confused to disbelieving.

“Say that again,” he told her.

“Say what again?” she asked innocently.

“What do you mean, you’re gonna bring your sister back to life?”

She tilted her head in false puzzlement as if what she’d said was the most normal thing in the world. “It means exactly what you think it means, obviously. She’s dead now, but we’re going to make her alive again.”

“T-that’s not possible! You’re crazy!”

“It is, though. I’ve seen it. I know somebody who died not too long ago, and he’s back alive again, perfectly healthy. It’s like he never died at all.”

Higo’s face darkened. “That’s a load of shit. What are you trying to do, play some sick Elseling trick on me?”

“It’s no trick. There’s this big, giant forest far out to the west, and in there lives a whole big group of people, and one of them has a special power. He can bring anybody back to life, as long as he has a piece of their body. Just a hand or an ear, or even an old bone.”

He shook his head fervently. “No. Impossible.”

“I would have said the same thing just two seasons ago, but this world is full of surprises, you know? So yes, we made a deal with the Stragmans to let us use this man to bring my sister back.” Sofie sighed. “I might have to miss it, though. Unless...”

She put on her thinking face, ignoring the boy’s defiant glare.

“Higo. Would you like to make a deal?”

“Never!” he hissed.

“You sure? Not even to get your sister back?”

Higo opened his mouth to say something but the words seemed to get caught in his throat. He clenched his jaw shut and let out a blast of angry air from his nose as his glare intensified.

“Trust not the words of the Elseling, for they speak naught but lies,” he finally stated. “I will not let you twist me, Elseling. I am a proud soldier of Otharia! I will not betray my people again!”

Sofie let out a mocking laugh. “Oh Higo, I’m sorry to tell you this, but you are not a soldier.”

“How dare you! I am too-”

“You vomit at the sight of violence. You look like you’re going to vomit just from thinking about past violence. Face it, Higo. Some people are suited to fighting, but you are not one of them. Do you know what your squadmates say about you when you’re not around? I hate to tell you this, but it’s not flattering.”

“Shut up! My squad respects me! They’re making me into a true man!”

Sofie laughed harder this time. “Really? Because all they’ve done so far is make you into a gofer. A lackey. A patsy. When’s the last time they’ve done anything besides order you around and beat you for having your own thoughts? They just keep you around so they have somebody to push around, somebody who will do all the dirty tasks they don’t want to do. You’re not a soldier. You’re barely even a bandit. You’re nothing, Higo. You’re a joke to them. And when the others join the Resistance, they won’t have a need for you anymore. You’ll only embarrass them. So they’ll toss you out onto the street, and then you’ll really be nothing.”

Higo’s eyes went wide. “You... they wouldn’t!”

“Listen to me, Higo,” Sofie said, earnest and serious. “You are not cut out for this life. When Lord Ferros decides it’s time to crack down on all the bandits hiding out in the wilderness, you’ll end up as nothing but a dead body in a forest, and nobody will care. That is the path you’re on, Higo. That is your future.

“It doesn’t have to end that way. Is your sister buried somewhere? We can bring her back. We can give you your sister back, Higo. I’ll make sure that Lord Ferros doesn’t do anything to either of you. All you have to do is help me. All you have to do is get me out of here.”

“You’re... you’re lying...” he repeated, but the verve was missing this time.

“I can help you, Higo,” she pushed. “But not if I’m dead.”

Higo still had an angry, distrustful look on his face, but he didn’t say anything and just stared at his feet, thinking about something. Finally, he looked back up and said, “Even if you could do all that, what would it matter? We’d just starve again. Losing her once was bad enough. I couldn’t deal with that a second time.”

“You won’t have to. I guess you haven’t heard, living in a cave and all, but crops yields were fantastic last harvest, better than you could imagine. Minister Upeslacis even told me that last winter was the best winter he could remember, food-wise.”

The boy looked at her, his brow furrowing. “Upeslacis? You mean Old Man Upeslacis?”

Sofie blinked. “You know him? Thin, old guy? Always grumpy about something?”

“He was the head farmer a few villages away. Father always said that Old Man Upeslacis was a man worth respecting. But now even he’s fallen to your master?” He let out a forlorn sigh.

“Okay, first off, you all keep saying that but he is not my master, he is not my boss, and I don’t have to listen to a word he says. And Minister Upeslacis has not ‘fallen’ to anybody. What he’s done is worked his old butt off every day to make sure that what happened to your family never happens again. Haven’t you seen all the work going on nearby? All the new farmland opening up and the new farming tools making harvesting easier?”

She sat up straight as a thought floated into her mind.

“Actually, that gives me a great idea. That old grump is always complaining that he needs more help. We could get you a job, working for him. You’d be paid well. You and your sister would never have to worry about money again. And you wanted to serve your people, right? You said you joined the Army to protect Otharia from evil. What better way to save them than to save them from the evil scourge that is starvation?”

The boy hesitated, and Sofie’s hopes soared. But then he shook his head, his gaze hardening.

“I... no. I can’t trust an Elseling. Your words are nice, but they’re too good. There’s no way you could do what you say. You can’t bring her back. You can’t,” he repeated, though it seemed like he was talking more to himself than to her.

Standing up, he walked over and stuffed the rags back into her mouth. “Please don’t talk anymore,” he told her.

Sofie fought back the urge to tell him she could still talk just fine through the rags, and that actual words weren’t needed for communication in Scyria at all. Instead, she let out a sigh as the teen strode back to his usual spot and sat down again, purposely avoiding looking her way. She’d tried, and he hadn’t gone for it.

But he’d wavered.

Ooooh, had she seen him waver.

The seed had been planted. Now she could only hope that it would grow quickly, while there was still time.

----------------------------------------

Snake and Weasel returned that afternoon. It seemed their meeting had been a success. The Resistance would be sending somebody over to inspect her tomorrow and smuggle her—and them—back into Wroetin. That meant that tonight was the last night the bandit group would spend in this hideout. Snake immediately declared it a cause for celebration.

There was just one problem: they’d run out of booze days ago. And so, it was time for one last raid. A quick strike, in and out in the darkness of the night, with enough booze to last the night and then some. Weasel knew a place ripe for the picking, apparently.

But first, Weasel demanded his turn.

“I’d say you’re lucky,” he told her with a frown of dissatisfaction. “The Resistance wants you whole. They probably want to break you themselves. So let’s make this one to remember, hm?”

Sofie had found the man disturbing since the moment she’d first spotted him, but she’d had no idea just how spot-on her instincts had been until now. The man was a maestro of pain. He seemed to have a horrible talent, able to slowly rip away her last toenails just enough to maximize the pain while minimizing the damage, all so he could inflict even more. She’d thought the previous rounds bad, but this hurt several times more, at least. Like the others, he removed two toenails with excruciating slowness.

Then he moved on to another.

And another.

Sofie felt like she was adrift in a sea of suffering, wave after wave of torment crashing down on top of her and pushing her under, forcing her to swim back up for air. Every time, it became harder. By the time he moved on to her fingers, she’d retreated fully into her mind, just trying to keep from drowning.

She knew she could make it stop at any time. In her mind there flashed a large red button, pulsating right in front of her, almost shouting at her to push it. It would solve everything, it said. It would make it all stop, the pain, the fear, all of it. All she had to do was say two simple words and she could be free. Free of every burden in the world. Just one choice and nothing would worry her ever again. Others would obey her every whim, their lives tied to her words and wants. All of Scyria would bow to her will and thank her for it. She could be everything, Empress of an entire world. All she had to do was take it.

Sofie’s stomach clenched and a torrent of vomit surged up her throat, hitting the rags in her mouth and taking a detour up through her nostrils instead before squirting out all over her chest and legs. The stomach acid burned on the inside as it mixed with her tears on the outside, her body contorting in agony all the while. She could feel herself on a mental precipice, just one strong shove away from crashing into a million pieces. She would lose herself, maybe forever.

But she refused. If Sofie was anything, she was stubborn to a fault, and she clung to that obstinate nature and refused. She had made up her mind, and she would rather lose herself forever than become the instrument of others’ subjugation. If she fell, she fell. That would be the end of it.

And besides, there was still a chance. She clung to that chance like a drowning sailor to a life raft in the middle of a typhoon. It was her lifeline.

It took Sofie a good while, stuck in her head as she was, to realize that they’d stopped the torture at some point. When she didn’t know, as she’d stopped being fully present in the moment a while ago. Nothing felt real, nothing had permanence.

Slowly, gingerly, she returned to the world outside. The others were talking about the raid, working out the details beforehand. She paid little attention to their discussion, letting her world be consumed by her thundering heartbeat and halting breaths.

She burrowed in on her shaky breathing, trying to push the pain away.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

There was still a chance. Higo had wavered. There was still a chance.

Soon enough, the time for the raid came. Higo had to stay behind to watch Sofie, like always.

“We’ll be back soon enough. You know what to do, soldier,” Snake told the boy with that self-assured, authoritative tone of a commanding officer. The way he turned from strong leader to bully and back made Sofie’s guts twist in disgust.

“R-right!” the young man replied with a stiff salute.

Soon enough, the other four left, leaving just the two of them alone in the cave. Higo said nothing as he lowered himself down against the cave side and sighed. Bending his knees up and in, he propped his elbows against them and cradled his face in his hands as he let out a long, tense breath. She could see the gears turning in his head. All she could do was wait and hope.

“You promise you can bring her back?” he finally asked.

Sofie wanted to weep, but she hid her desperation behind a mask of sincerity. Rags still in her mouth, she gave an affirmative grunt of “yes”.

He stood up and walked over to her, squatted down beside her, and looked at her with frightened and desperate eyes, but with a glimmer of hope held within. With a quick motion, he reached out and pulled the rags out of her mouth for what she felt like would be the last time.

“Yes,” she replied immediately. “Yes, I promise. Just get me out of this place.”

“I need you to swear it,” he told her. “Swear it on your life.”

Sofie locked eyes with him and spoke with full conviction. “I swear. I will do everything in my power to bring your sister back to life. I will cut a deal with the Stragmans, paying whatever I must, so that they revive your sister along with mine. I will get her back for you. And then I will get you a job helping the old man so that nobody has to starve anymore. I swear this on my life, may God, Othar, or any other deity strike me down otherwise.”

The boy took another large breath, seemingly attempting to will himself some courage. “Alright. Let’s go then.” He pulled out a small knife and started cutting away at the thick ropes tying her to the wall.

The process went far slower than Sofie wanted, the ropes proving even tougher than she’d thought them. It took several minutes for him to cut even a third of the way through.

“I’m disappointed, Scritt,” Snake’s voice called out from the darkness outside the cave.

Higo spun about, hiding the blade behind his back, as Snake and the others stepped into the light of the torches, their expressions hard as the stone they stood upon.

“To think that I defended you when the others told me their suspicions,” Snake spat, slithering up to Higo’s trembling form. “If you were so desperate to get laid, you could have just taken a comely lass the next raid, had your way with her, and been done with it. But no, you’ve proven once again, even after all this time, that you’re just as worthless as you were when we first got stuck with you.”

“It’s not-” Higo began, but Snake’s right hand snapped out, grabbing the boy’s neck tightly and cutting off any further words.

“Just worthless,” he repeated. With a grunt of effort, he turned and threw the younger man across the cave towards the entrance. The others stepped out of the way as Higo flew by them and tumbled across the cold, hard floor.

“Higo!” Sofie cried as the kid came to a stop splayed awkwardly along the ground.

“As for you, you manipulative little bitch...” Snake continued, turning back to her with a glare of cold malice.

Sofie blanched and involuntarily scooted back.

“Leave her alone!” Higo shouted, pulling himself to his feet. He swayed unsteadily, and blood flowed steadily from his forehead down the left side of his face and eye.

“Higo, run, you idiot!” Sofie shouted.

The idiot refused to listen.

“You truly are even dumber than I thought,” Snake snarled.

“Shut up! I’m done being kicked around by you!” Higo hollered, pulling his axe off of his back and gripping it firmly in front of him with both hands.

Sofie wanted to scream. Why, now of all times, had he finally found his courage?! Why, when it was only going to get him killed?!

Everything had gone sideways. Was there any other way out? Maybe if she distracted them, Higo would realize his error in judgment and flee while he still could? As Snake unsheathed his sword and stepped away from her, she realized it was far too late for that now. There was only one way out left.

Why? Why did it feel like no matter what she did, life forced her into these horrible situations? Was it just luck? Destiny? Or maybe it was all just the sum of her own terrible decisions. Maybe she deserved to be a mind rapist after all.

She took a breath, then another, and another still, each breath coming faster and faster as she worked up her own courage. There was no other way out now, she told herself. No other way but to embrace her terrible nature. With just a few words, she could stop all of this. Make them stop. Make them forget. Even make them die.

No. Even now, that was a line she could not cross. To go down that road was to become everything that she had ever professed to hate. It was to become like them. There would be no going back. Besides, she didn’t need to become a killer; all she had to do was control the situation. Control it through... mind rape.

She was hyperventilating now, her eyes no longer focusing on what was in front of her. Snake was saying something, but she didn’t hear it. All that mattered was finding the will to do what she had sworn to never do, the deeds that she had gone through literal torture to avoid committing. Sofie was so focused on that goal that she almost didn’t even notice when another person stepped into the torchlight behind Higo and buried a large dagger into the right side of his skull.

Everything stopped.

The most beautiful woman Sofie had ever seen stood behind Higo, a soft smile on her gorgeous lips. Her smooth, light, unblemished skin glowed and her long, amber hair seemed to shine in the torchlight. She wore a thin, fine dress embroidered with ornate patterns that accented her already stellar beauty. Somehow, neither the dress nor the woman seemed to have a single spot of dirt on them.

Nobody moved, as if a spell had been cast across the entire hideout. Likely, everybody else was in the same state of shock as Sofie, who was both stunned by the mysterious visitor’s sudden appearance and trying to figure out who they even were and what they were doing here. It wasn’t like anybody even knew there was a bandit hideout here!

Except there was, Sofie realized in a flash. Snake had said it himself: the Resistance were sending one of their own. Who else could this person be? It seemed that the Resistance didn’t want the bandits joining their shadowy ranks, and had sent a killer instead.

With effortless ease, the assassin ripped the blade from the boy’s head, casually sliding just out of range of the blood that followed so that none touched her immaculate outfit. Higo’s body fell to the right and landed with a wet thump, long dead before he even hit the ground.

The “thud!” of flesh against stone broke the spell, and Snake and Bull rushed forward, shouting battle cries while Hawk pulled out her bow and Weasel stayed back, a small ball of water forming above his hand. The woman only smirked, pulling out a second long knife with her other hand.

Sofie sat, stunned to silence by the events taking place before her eyes. The woman flowed between Snake and Bull with preternatural grace, somehow avoiding every strike of Snake’s sword and swing of Bull’s hammer with the absolute slightest movements necessary. Her left arm lashed out, swifter than a whip, and Snake’s right hand fell to the ground, no longer attached to his arm. He clutched his bleeding stump with his remaining hand and screamed as his lifeblood sprayed into the air.

The Resistance member danced between the crimson droplets, spinning through utterly untouched. She swayed just slightly as Hawk, cussing up a storm, released her first arrow. The projectile seemed to miss the woman’s throat by no more than a millimeter, but it still missed. Almost as an afterthought, she reached out and sliced the side of Snake’s neck, adding another fountain of blood to the grisly scene.

A stream of dark, murky water shot from Weasel’s hands, aiming at the newcomer’s face to disrupt her senses as Bull charged back in with another long swing of his hammer. As if she knew they both were coming, the woman tossed the knife in her left hand into the air and kicked off the nearby wall, flipping over both threats and slipping her thin form between Bull’s large arms. Her empty palm shot up, striking the spinning knife at the base of the handle and driving it straight up through Bull’s jaw and into his brain. Bull’s body stiffened and she slipped away, somehow bending just as needed to keep her spotless dress from touching any of the dirt on Bull’s chest or arms.

Hawk released another shot, the arrow launched directly at the woman’s head with as much power as the archer could generate. The killer arched backward, her left leg kicking straight upward with such speed that it seemed to blur. The tink of metal against stone reached Sofie’s ears twice in quick succession. She blinked, unsure of what she’d just witnessed, as the arrow tumbled lazily through the air and landed in the woman’s open and waiting right hand.

Gripping the fletching almost daintily, the woman’s whole body seemed to straighten like a whip, her raised leg falling to plant itself firmly against the ground, her arched body rising back up, and her arm lashing out with blinding speed as she sent the arrow back at its owner. Hawk spasmed and fell, her own arrow driven more than halfway through her eye and into her head.

This wasn’t a fight. This wasn’t a battle. This was pure butchery hidden behind a veneer of supple grace, the bandits standing just as much a chance against this terrifying woman as hogs in a slaughterhouse. She wasn’t even trying. She was just toying with them.

Weasel turned and ran towards the smaller, secondary cave entrance, but it didn’t matter. The Resistance assassin flashed towards him, catching up and slicing the back of his knee before he could take more than two steps. His leg gave out and he tumbled to the ground. Before he’d even fully landed, the woman drove her blade down, deep into his neck.

An eerie quiet fell upon the scene now, as the woman stood alone amidst the mutilated corpses of her enemies. Blood splattered the walls and pooled on the ground, and yet she remained untouched, a lone, spotless flower standing tall in the middle of a wasteland.

Resistance assassin or not, Sofie found the woman far more terrifying than the bandits who had tormented her these last few days. Sofie wanted nothing to do with her whatsoever. She found herself praying that the woman would not notice her, that she would just walk away now that her business here was over. But there was no chance of that happening.

The killer turned, as graceful and poised as always, and looked at Sofie for the first time. Sofie’s heart seized as her gaze finally met and she finally saw the woman’s eyes in full. They were the eyes of a cat gazing lazily upon a mouse trapped in a corner.

As the Resistance member took easy steps through the crimson minefield, never once stepping on anything but dry stone, her gaze never left Sofie even once. It was that gaze that finally broke Sofie, sundering the last remnants of restraint that remained inside her. Panic, fear, and a desperate need to live surged forth.

Sofie opened her mouth and, with every fiber of her being, screamed, “Don’t move!”

The woman halted mid-step, blinked, teetered, and toppled face-first into a pool of blood.