Chapter Two: Overwhelmed and Enthralled

+++++Ezra+++++

At the time, Ezra had no idea that his body had just been signed over to the sorcerer Fenrik of Westval, nor that the body he now inhabited was not his own, nor that sorcerers even existed. It would have been a lot to take in, even if he hadn't been utterly overwhelmed with sensation.

There were periods of unconsciousness, periods of chaotic overstimulation, and periods where unimaginable pain was piled on top of that. Usually, but not always, the pain radiated out from his chest. He felt his body moving, but not of his own volition. But his movements weren't spasms of pure, confused agony, either. A strange, dull pain radiated out from the center of his chest and then his body would move, as if being marched about as a gearworks automaton.

Whenever Ezra awoke, it would be with sensation gradually trickling into his body - the cool of the table he was on. The curious head-tilt of the magpie that observed him, the rustle of breeze in the trees… the magpie had a tiny metallic knob right in the middle of its chest. That was odd. And then the room would grow brighter, the ambient noise louder, the smells and tastes and myriad other sensations of the external world more intense, and Ezra would find himself back in his overstimulated hell, unable to make any sense of the maddening world until the welcome peace of unconsciousness once again overtook him.

This continued for some time… days? Weeks? He was utterly unable to say. But it felt like an entire epoch of his life, an epoch of madness and pain. He wished the madness would just permanently overtake him instead of torturing him with little respites of awareness as the strange world he found himself in geared up to bombard him.

"Sa is nye ge ditʼu bùhal si mi qekʼi yu," the dark-clad man said. If Ezra could understand the language, he might have translated it as: /You are a lesser spirit than what I was promised./

He couldn't understand the language, but it was surprising enough to have the chaos of light and sound and touch interrupted by a comprehensible sentence, even if he didn't currently comprehend it. The brightness around Ezra faded and he found himself in a darkened, cluttered study. The dark-clad man lowered something heavy and metallic over Ezra's eyes, darkening his vision for a moment, but that was soon rectified when he clapped and the room's lighting flickered to life.

"Yu mi nùzhi da?" A young woman asked. Dark-haired and round-faced, she perched on a stool behind the man, concern and curiosity competing across her face. /Can he understand us?/

"I… I don't understand…" Ezra said. He tried to point to his ear but found that something metal had been bolted right into the side of his head there.

The dark-clad man seemed pleased with this. "Ogo! Tʼu yu mi nùnu nye ĵeki, pʼuwa ṣe cĥi da maq̂ùnya…" /Ah! So he does speak a language, just not one we know./

They went back and forth like that for a bit, with the dark-clad man becoming more excited when it became clear that Ezra could learn their words, even if he didn't currently speak them. He learned that the man was Fenrik of Westphal and the young woman was Anise Derrigin… Fenrik's niece, it would seem. At least, those were close approximations of their names, an odd departure from the strange language they spoke and much closer to the languages that Ezra was familiar with. When it came to English, though, neither had any clue and nor did Fenrik appear interested to learn. Eventually, he grew bored of their interaction and turned to Anise:

"Pʼoresi sa cĥi ji mi teqo." /Show this one to his chamber./

"Yogo, nyetùwu." /Yes, uncle./

Calling it a chamber was a bit generous. It was more like a jail cell, perhaps six feet on a side with a chamber pot and an old, torn pallet on the floor and a stool to sit on. The walls were unadorned brick and the door had a heavy lock, which Anise seemed contrite about securing, but she secured it anyway. As she paced away down the hallway, Ezra wondered what had just befallen him and what would become of him. For lack of a mirror, he turned his attention to the hazy brass of the chamber pot to get a look at himself…

He was the young man from the sanitarium bed, only he'd been… Ezra supposed modified would be the right word. A block of clunky black had been affixed to the front of his face and what amounted to metal headphones screwed right into the sides of his head. The seams were a bit sore, but they appeared to have healed, so he must have been in that state for some time. The front of the eyepiece could be lifted up but, as soon as the… they must have been welding goggles… as soon as the welding goggles were lifted, Ezra's eyes were bombarded with blinding light that squeezing his eyes shut could barely mitigate. Fenrik had 'fixed' Ezra to be able to function, it would seem.

+++++

Nobody would ever call the city of St. Arbalest a fair place. Though slavery had been outlawed for some time, several of the city's predominant races survived as a more-or-less permanent underclass and, below that, were the enthralled Infernics, so-called demons summoned into the bodies of the comatose or hopelessly infirm. Though they occupied the bodies of humans (or the several other races that could host them), they were not human, and their thrall-plugs attested to this state. Though Ezra didn't yet know this, he could confirm that he had the two-inch chrome circle of a thrall-plug sticking out from his chest, the arcane device used to both inject his own soul into the young man's body and to allow Fenrik to exert control over him.

+++++Anise+++++

Anise wasn't sure what to make of this latest turn of events. She was hopeful that a new thrall would, perhaps, get her uncle to assign her to less menial tasks than what he'd delegated to her thus far. Most of the girls at St. Quillia's would give their left thumb to study under Uncle Fenrik who was, after all, a mage of the 7th elevation - a full sorcerer, one of fewer than twenty in the whole city. But all Fenrik did was send her on menial errands or have her do basic benchcraft that she could have accomplished back when she was a novice. Even Yacha, her uncle's bird-thrall, did more important things. Maybe the boy thrall would free up time for her to do more…

On the other hand, Anise wasn't sure how she felt about thralls in general. True, thralls were the spirits of demons given corporeal form through a soul-crystal. But a demon was simply a being from another plane captured and brought to their plane of existence in Medias. They could be good or evil just like people could… though she supposed it was better to be safe than sorry. The demon-thrall-boy hadn't seemed evil. He'd seemed confused, and then hurt when she locked him into his chamber. She returned to her uncle's study, the blue of her dress swishing past stacks of books and the ruins of half-completed artifices.

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"What do you think is wrong with him?" she asked.

Fenrik looked up from his work - he looked to be sketching out the plans for another thrall-plug. That suggested that he viewed the thrall-boy as a probable failure though, in Anise's opinion, it was far too soon to tell. But she was only a 3rd elevation Adept and would never say as much to a full sorcerer, not even her uncle.

"It… that thrall is an it, not a him. They're not people," Fenrik said.

He whistled to Yacha, who fluttered over with his pipe. With a snap of his fingers, he ignited the contents and took a long draw on the apuiha, which literally meant 'sweet smoke' in Unilog. Anise relaxed a bit, because apuiha always relaxed Fenrik, whereas liquor would get him riled up and argumentative. And, of course she knew that thralls weren't people. Everybody knew that, but they still had the bodies of humans or kao-alta or whatever other race happened to have a braindead unfortunate with a body to spare. He looked to her expectantly.

"What do you think is wrong with it?"

He shrugged. "Probably nothing. We probably got a substandard soul. There's always a little risk of that, though Gladion, that plant bastard, swore that his crystal would draw in a big one. But greater demons… the ones that are actually useful for a sorcerer to have… well, all of those speak in whatever tongue their master uses. And this one… it speaks in… well, something else."

"I've never heard of a language like it," Anise admitted.

"Some sort of primitive demon tongue, or maybe a pidgin language like what the prymen speak. That's probably why we needed to shutter its senses, too - the amount of information human senses take in probably overwhelmed it." The sorcerer sighed and leaned back in his chair. "Oh well… it's young and lord knows there's a lot to be done around here that doesn't require a whole lot to be going on upstairs." He tapped at the side of his head. "I'll get whatever use I can out of the boy… out of it… because even if Gladion gives me a refund, the boy's parents sure as hell won't and I paid three stacks for their son's body."

Anise almost gasped, but she held it back. Three stacks… three thousand brownbacks… was an awful lot of money. But she was hardly one to talk. Her parents spent that much every year sending her to St. Quillia's Etudium Mystikal for Magistresses. And now, on her one month off from school, they'd absconded to some resort up the coast and asked the great sorcerer, her mother's older brother, to be her mentor. This, despite the fact that Fenrik was adamant that women didn't make good magic-users.

"Good enough for most things," he'd clarified once Anise was accepted into St. Quillia's. "But the so-called sorceresses I've seen are barely better than adepts by St. Arbalest's standards."

As far as Anise knew and as far as her textbooks said, there was no substantial difference between elevations and power levels between sorcerers and sorceresses. Sure, there were far fewer of the latter, but Anise was sure this was because women hadn't even been allowed to learn magic a hundred years ago, and two hundred years ago they'd have been incinerated by arcane fire under charges of witchcraft and devilry. Magic didn't care what was there between your legs. If you practiced and concentrated enough energy, your soul would reconfigure to optimize the arcane load and you'd elevate to a higher level of magical control.

Someday, Anise would be a sorceress, and then she'd have thralls under her command. She'd prove to her uncle that she was even more capable than him. But she'd rather her thralls be magpies like Yacha or big cats like Mistress Bulia's trio of feline familiars. Her coterie of cats would pile on top of her uncle until he cried out for mercy. She felt bad for her uncle's new thrall and decided she'd do what she could to prove he was worth keeping around.

+++++Ezra+++++

The dark-clad man had some sort of power over Ezra, a power that he couldn't quite comprehend. Since Ezra couldn't really speak the language, Fenrik would sometimes demonstrate what he wanted to be done and then watch for a few minutes as Ezra did his best to emulate it, whether that was organizing papers, sorting crystals by color, or washing the dishes. It seemed that Ezra was expected to be a live-in servant for the man.

If he could have escaped, he would have, but he was terrified of the power the man commanded. To wit: with a casual gesture, he could make Ezra's body move however he liked. When Ezra failed to emulate Fenrik's actions, the sorcerer would simply take over his body to demonstrate what he wanted more directly. But the sorcerer had to be there and watching Ezra for that to work, or so it seemed. But he could also summon Ezra from anywhere in the house - a strange pulsing in his chest like the heartbeat he could no longer feel, followed by progressive levels of discomfort and pain as the sorcerer grew more impatient. The thrall-plug in his chest seemed to be the locus of control.

"Nùsu-zizhùke." Anise tapped on the steel plug underneath his shirt.

Ezra repeated the phrase, and then repeated it again after she winced at his pronunciation. Then he wrote it in Anise's little notebook. Their language, which was called Unilog, was a strange one. But, stranger yet, he seemed to be soaking it up like a sponge. Fenrik didn't care much about teaching Ezra, so most of what he got from the sorcerer was how to curse and insult in the language. But Anise seemed intent on spending an hour or two each day with him, patiently explaining words and then how to string them together into phrases and sentences. And, once he remembered a word or its pronunciation, Ezra never seemed to forget it. He gathered that this was not a common skill because Anise seemed impressed and sometimes amazed by his progress.

When she showed him the strange, swirling letters of the Unilog alphabet, their pronunciation scheme made perfect sense and his accent became easily-intelligible almost overnight. Anise would point at objects and have him write down what they were - and, if he didn't know the word, she'd say it carefully and then wait for him to write it down, correcting him if it was a word with irregular spelling. Currently, he felt a throbbing within his chest - the sorcerer needed them for something.

"Ya si bù nùsu genyeza jùmi yu sheke-qùchonyo," Fenrik said. /You and the thrall will fetch my new bookcases./

Anise said nothing to her uncle, but she grumbled about it as they paced back down the hallway. Ezra didn't blame her - from what he understood, the girl was a beginning mage of some sort. And, having been forced into a strange body in this strange world as a slave, he had no trouble in accepting that magic existed. It was a rude awakening into the world, to be sure, but quite persuasive. Anise could do what amounted to minor sorcery by concentrating, summoning, and shaping some sort of energy. Ezra gathered that the energy at her disposal was quite limited, and so she wore a dozen little trinkets and pieces of jewelry on her person to harvest the ambient energy for her to tap on demand. Her uncle relied on trinkets much less frequently, for he'd learned to tap into whatever ambient energy was out there without assistance. And Ezra? He had no idea about any of it.

Anise had explained to him the focusing practice of the first elevation, which amounted to a sort of mindfulness meditation. By doing this, Ezra thought he could feel some sort of energy vaguely floating around his… well, around whatever resided inside his body right behind the thrall-plug. And he could use that energy, whether it was magical energy or just accumulated willpower, to avoid being overwhelmed when he lifted his visor or let the pills that numbed his skin wear off. But it never lasted for more than a few minutes, so when he followed after Anise on his first trip out into the city, it was with a heavy metal visor over his eyes, metal mufflers over his ears, and the scars of a third metal plate still healing over his forehead… this had been, apparently, to block his 'third eye', but Fenrik had deemed this unnecessary since Ezra was not whatever sort of thing the sorcerer had originally attempted to summon.

He followed after her out the front entrance and almost collapsed at the sight of the place. It was… it was very different from Oregon. Or SoCal, for that matter. Wherever he was, it sure as hell wasn't Earth.