> "I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all."

>

> -Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen

Micha Ostor worried for the woman's fate, not just because of her extensive injuries, but because in the briefest of moments, his hand had touched hers. And it was one thing for his captor to suffer the bad luck that cursed the godling's soul, but for an innocent to share that fate left a bad taste in his mouth.

I could tell her when she wakes up. If she wakes up, that is. The godling's brief bout of clarity soon passed to more childish thoughts, namely that of escape and survival in the world every deity dreaded to find themselves in. Threats of abandonment of godlings like Micha to the Retribution Fields were common and had the intended effect, but as soon as he could think and speak, the judging stares of his mother and the dismissive grunts of his father made that reality seemed that much closer to coming true.

Nothing here is like how the stories went about things. For one, everybody seems pretty decent, to a point. The godling's eyes went towards the lumpy back of one Reuth Giapain, studying something on the desk that came with their inn room for close to an hour now. The bad luck doesn't seem to be affecting him all that much, or is it just piling up for a bigger effect later?

If there was one thing that the godling's mother did right, it was that she explained rather candidly and with little emotion of how she'd tied up the bad luck of her followers into Micha's soul, and her reason for doing so was a kind laziness most sloths would find agreeable, but disgusting.

"I don't want to balance things out one-by-one. It's too much work deciding who's lucky and who's not, so might as well make it so you're always unlucky instead. Pretty smart, right?"

He was two years old when she told him, and the bawling that ensued earned him total isolation in his room for about a week. When he came out of his room, his father had ambushed him with an impromptu spar, ending six hours later with what remained of his tearducts sealing shut forever. This loss were one of the very few things Micha mourned over up until his eventual exile, because the relief that came after those tears fell was a comfort not even sleep could give him.

The godling's train of thought stopped as he felt his captor stop as well. The injured woman, embalmed in makeshift healing wards besides them, twitched, but remained blissfully unconscious. Micha Ostor saw as Reuth moved this patient towards what seemed to be a hole on the side of a building, which was alarming enough for the godling, but his worry became shock when that hole grew teeth and greedily devoured the woman's body into itself, tongues salivating over every inch of burned flesh and torn skin.

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"You ... killed her!" Micha said, "I thought we were going to help her."

"For free? Hell no." Reuth said plainly, frowning as the same carnivorous building spouted a mouth-laden tentacle towards his face. With plain annoyance, one of Reuth's hands shot out and flicked several coins to the tentacle, which snapped up every bit with surprising deftness. A low moan escaped from the tentacle's mouths, ending with a surprisingly chipper 'Thank you!" slipping through as the building took back its coin-snapping appendage. "I am going to get paid for my trouble, and this is the way to do it."

Any more questions Micha had were paused as the building's exterior pulsated and shifted in color and texture, increasing intensity before another tentacle sprouted out and landed near the duo, its tip peeling back tor reveal the woman from before, fully healed and completely naked, with one small addition to to her appearance.

"She's got a life-debt to me now, and I intend to make her work very hard to settle it." Reuth smirked as he pressed his staff against the glowing circles embedded on the middle of the woman's chest. A new marking seared into view, of two crescents resting atop an opaque diamond. The pain also seemed to wake up the woman, who collaped to her knees and immediately clutched at her previously missing arm with phantom pain.

"Who? Why?" She said as her memories came back in a flood. Her vision soon took in the kidnapper and the kid before her, with the former smirking back in distinctly unpleasant way. Her lungs took two gulps before she realized her nakedness, and with the third and a simple wave of her hand, her clothed self stood with questions soon to be answered on their own.

"Hello. Welcome back." Micha greeted her. "You almost died."

" ... I guess I did. Thanks for saving me." The gratitude in her voice died as she now felt the marking on her chest pulsate once. She removed part of her clothes there and conjured a mirror, with the reflection revealing both her unfortunate fate as well as the terrifying glare enveloping the woman's face.

"Yes. You're mine now, until the marking thinks you've paid back the life-debt you owe me." Reuth Giapain said with aplomb, to a level one might even consider arrogance. "You live here, so you know this was bound to happen, if it didn't already happen before to you, so stop looking at me like that and start making yourself useful for a change."

A strange look came over the woman's face as Reuth said these things, shifting from a knowing look, to mild shock and irritation, before turning into a kind of ironic deprecation only she appreciated. She kept her fists clenched and arms shaking with clear fury before she took three deep breaths and let go of that emotion from her mind. The eyes that looked back into Reuth Giapain's own were now filled with determination, contempt, and cold apathy more at home in the depths of space than inside a living person.

"Where to now, Master?"

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