Warning: This chapter contains depictions of violence that some may find disturbing.

They spent the first hour or three beating me. Sometimes they used their fists. Sometimes they used what looked like police batons. They worked me over one at a time, spelling each other so I never had time to rest or recover. The blonde woman, or was her hair white, I kept going back and forth, oversaw the evening’s entertainment from a distance. She bestowed a wide, pleased smile on her underlings. The pain was incredible. I’d been hurt before. I’d broken my arm once, had my nose broken a half-dozen times, been cut, clawed, burned, and had more magical destruction thrown at me than I could easily remember. Yet, I’d never endured such a prolonged beating. Get hit often enough and the pain doesn’t fade out. It keeps dogging you, wearing you down with a whole-body ache. The muscles started to stab at you, probably as damaged nerve endings began misfiring, sending errant signals to the brain that all amounted to the same message. “Whatever you’re doing, stop it, moron!” Of course, you can’t explain to muscles and joints that you aren’t doing it to yourself. So, they keep sending the messages with increasing frequency and ferocity. You stop thinking in anything like words. Your world boils down to a binary state of more pain or less pain.

Of course, after a while, the ongoing traumas start to affect your internal organs. There’s no good way to assess that damage, at least until the first time that you cough up a mouth full of blood. That’s you know for sure that things are breaking or breaking down inside of you. When that happened to me, I wanted to be scared, should have been terrified, but I just hurt too much. My head lolled forward, and I opened my mouth. A few seconds later, bright red splashed across the floor below me. I stared down at that red in something resembling amusement. Well, if amusement has a funhouse mirror reflection that's dressed like a murderous clown, that's what I felt. In my defense, it was such a cheerful color for something so hideously ominous. I started to laugh, choking laughter that probably threw bloody spittle in every direction. I think it was hysteria laughter and, for all I knew, the only way my battered brain knew how to process the knowledge that these people were going to kill me. I couldn’t believe it. After all the training and more than a few victories over the forces of evil, I was going die strapped to a big metal square.

Sadness hit me then. Not so much over the idea that I was going to die, but that it was going to happen to me so very young. It was hard not to think about all the things I was never going to do. I’d never turn thirty. I’d never get married or have kids, not that I’d really expected to do either of those, but you never knew. I’d never get to ask Gran who or what she really was beneath her kind, grandmotherly bluster. Uncle Bill would never get to hear how grateful I was for all the things he’d taught me and all the time he’d spent with me, even when I was going through my angsty, rebellious phase. I’d never leave the country. There had always been vague plans in the back of my head to travel at some point and see the wonders of the world. I’d wanted to visit Victoria Falls because it was the largest waterfall in the world and that had to be worth seeing. I’d always meant to track down my parents, assuming they were still alive. The reasons for that were opaque in my head. Sometimes, I thought it was to ask them why they’d abandoned me. Sometimes, I thought it was to kill them for abandoning me. Life on the street isn’t kind to a small child. I’d survived, but only because I’d learned to be mean and learned it fast. A voice cut my ruminations short.

“Do we amuse you, Mr. Lott?”

I forced my head up enough to look for whoever was interrupting my dying thought. I saw the leader of the Raven’s Council frowning at me. I couldn’t think of anything useful to say, so I shook my head. They weren’t hitting me right then, and that seemed like a good thing to encourage. So, I dug deep for something to say.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

She gave me a chilly smile. “You don’t know? My, oh my, the old woman must be slipping rather badly these days. She didn’t even tell you who you were up against. Dementia, is it?”

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

I said nothing. It was taking all my concentration to keep my head lifted enough to see the woman. She regarded me in silence, waiting until she was sure I wasn’t going to say anything. Then she stood, gave me a mocking little bow, and threw her arms wide.

“My name, little knight, is Victoria Ambrosia.”

The words were out of my mouth before I could stop myself. “Don’t strippers give up the name when they retire?”

Victoria Ambrosia bared her teeth at me in an animal snarl. “Timothy, teach the whelp respect.”

There was a noise behind me, like something being moved into place, then a felt someone grab the index finger on my left hand. Even in my pain-fogged state, I had enough common sense to clamp my jaw. The finger was wrenched back until it broke with an audible crack. I tried to hold it in, but I screamed. I just didn’t have the strength to fight my own body’s reactions. I took huge, heaving breaths and then spit out some more blood. Then, I felt a hand wrap around my middle finger. The index finger was already sending hot, stabbing distress signals down my arm. I tried to close my hand, but it was too late. Timothy broke that finger too. Victoria Ambrosia came over and something cold pressed under my chin, lifting my head so she could look into my eyes.

“I’m going to hurt you now,” she said.

Someone came in and set a brazier filled with red coals on a little table. She looked from me to the brazier and back again. I watched as she walked over to the brazier. She held up her hand. She wore an odd, finger-length ring on her index finger. The end was curved into a vicious little hook that looked sharp. She dipped the hook into the coals and left it there for a while. She regarded me and then started talking.

“Aside from simple blunt force trauma to organs, the single biggest reason people die while being tortured is blood loss. It’s terribly inconvenient. And I wouldn’t want you to miss out on the things we have in store.”

She lifted her finger from the brazier and the end of the hook glowed red. My brain told me that the stupid ring should be burning her. Since it obviously wasn’t, I chalked it up to magic. She walked toward me holding the evil little implement out in front of her where I could see it. Smoke wafted off the hook as hot metal met room-temperature air. I didn’t have illusions it would be cold by the time she reached me. She held the little hook right in front of my eye. I could feel the terrible heat of it, the dull red glow, and almost hear the metal creaking as it started to cool. She lowered the hook and bared her teeth at me again as she sank the hook between two of my ribs. There was a flash of searing, unholy pain that ripped the breath out of me. She dragged the hook in a line of fire that I couldn’t escape. I screamed until I couldn’t find the breath for it anymore.

At some point, when reason returned, I looked around. Victoria was back at the brazier. She must have felt me looking because she turned her gaze on me. She lifted her hand from the brazier and there was another of the hooked rings on her middle finger. I stared at the little glowing hooks. Pure, animal fear ripped at my insides. I felt the jackhammer pace of my heart in my chest. My body cried out to flee, escape, but there was nowhere to go. She circled the frame once before she took up station behind me. That was even scarier. Twin spots of molten pain erupted on either side of my spine. I heard my skin and the muscle beneath sizzling as she burned and tore her way down my back. I tried to jerk away, but the clamps at my ankles and wrists held fast.

The next time I looked up, she had three of the rings on her fingers. I whimpered. They were going to be able to keep this up for longer than my sanity would hold. If I’d been fresh, less physically brutalized, then maybe I could have held out for longer. But, under those conditions, I didn’t have the physical or mental reserves. I looked away from her, my eyes falling on the metal framework. I saw the charred runes there and my desperate mind finally made the connection. When I’d thrown the killing magic, or tried to at any rate, it had taxed the limits of the runes. If I threw enough magic, all at once, it might cause the entire framework to rupture. The resulting explosion would probably kill me, but I might take a few of them with me. I was content with that. The runes didn’t stop from me gathering up power and energy, just from making it do what I wanted. In this case, though, I didn’t care. I had to work fast. I didn’t look at Victoria. I closed my eyes. I pulled hard, drawing on the deepest wells of my own magic, the magic in the room, the magic that existed all around us, all the time. I filled myself until I was certain that I couldn’t hold another drop. Then, there was a noise from outside the room somewhere. It sounded like the cry of a wounded animal, though no animal I ever had or ever wanted to encounter. Then the entire building shook. I snapped my eyes open and Victoria Ambrosia was looking around in unabashed shock.

“Hey Victoria,” I said.

She turned to look at me, and I smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile.

“Rot in hell, bitch,” I said and unleashed my power.