My head swam. Brief memories flickered in front of my eyes. I was six, and drunk for the first time on stolen mead... eleven, and drowsy with fever... nineteen again, revelling in my freedom from my cursed brother's threat over my life... twenty-two...
The room spun horribly, and I retched. One eye too badly bruised to open, the other could make out blurred stone, dark and foreboding.
"Open your eyes."
The words made no sense. I tried to move my stiff arms and found them shackled above my head to the surface I lay on. The effort sent a searing pain up my side and I retched again. My head lolled to one side only to come up short against the band restraining my forehead. I stopped attempting to see.
"Open your eyes."
The words were clearer, the voice cool, clipped, devoid of emotion. When I did not comply, a thumb pressed against my bruised eyelid, pushing it back, forcing me to stare into the scarred, warped, horribly familiar face of the mage. Even as he held my vision there, my sight blurred and swirled nauseatingly. His gaze was the cool, analytical examination of a scholar, assessing a subject. In the days preceding, I had come to fear that gaze almost as much as I hated it.
"You must stay awake. I cannot obtain reliable results when you are unconscious.■
He turned away, and my eyelids fluttered closed again. The fuzziness in my head lessened somewhat, and I moaned as the pain sharpened in response. A cool hand on the side of my face repulsed me, but I lacked the strength to recoil.
"You must observe carefully for this next test. Open your eyes."
The thumb of the hand gripping my face pushed my eyelid up again. My stomach knotted in terror, as he positioned something which glinted like steel close behind my eyeball. His face was locked in concentration, I doubt he even noticed my screams as he sliced deep, painstakingly slowly into the temple behind my open eye. A rush of colours swirled in front of me, heat surged in my veins and I convulsed against my bonds. Only the band across my forehead prevented me from ripping the side of my own head open on his implement. He pulled the blade out and my back arched involuntarily, straining against the bonds on my wrists and ankles. I collapsed, sobbing, feeling my own blood slowly seep down to slick the hair beside my right temple.
His fingertips inspected the edge of the wound, probing in and around it, making horrible wet sounds resonate in my skull. He murmured something and I whimpered as hot, red light flared around them, growing in heat and intensity until I was screaming again. The magical energy seeped through the blood and into my brain, I felt my mind blaze with agony, felt the rage rise hot and dark and murderous within me, saw the dark crimson cloud eclipse my vision... and fade to black as I fell deep again into unconsciousness.
When I awoke, I was upright, hanging from raw wrists by manacles bolted to a single chain. My head was agony, my body ached. I tried to raise my head to see my surroundings, but my strength was leaving me, a little more with each awakening. Through the pounding in my temples, I vaguely heard someone mutter an incantation before a suffocating pressure smacked my head up and back into the stone wall. The stench of decay hit my nostrils and my stomach convulsed. The spasm in my muscles triggered a sharp pain in my side. Numbly, I realised I was still bleeding, I had been cut open whilst I was unconscious. The irrational, drifting part of my mind attempted to tally the scars I was gaining day by day, before a sharp smack to the side of the face brought my focus back to the present, and the fear. Through the pain-borne confusion, my focus sharpened to the man in front of me - not the mage, but a tall, mail-clad apparition, with grey skin, leering at me through eyes the colour of old blood. My eyes widened, and I must have recoiled, as he grinned a grin devoid of any humour, revealing rows of jagged teeth.
Even with the paralytic helplessness radiating from the creature in front of me, the mages voice chilled me to the bone.
"You have much power, but it is nigh impossible to access. There must be a trigger. Since the power is locked within your blood - your essence, if you will - I am forced to hypothesise that the trigger is emotional. Logically, therefore, to proceed, we must find the trigger."
He spoke to me as if to a fellow scholar, as if I had any level of control. His cold sanity terrified me. The hate which grew in me for him daily struggled to make itself heard, then slipped, and ebbed away, plunging me back into the helplessness of agonised fear.
The chain-gauntleted hand closed around my throat, cutting off air which the spell already restricted. I drew on any strength I could find to struggle away from that grip, but my body dangled uselessly, exhaustion sapping my limbs of their obedience.
"The cambion is a thrall. I prefer not to give you his name, but you may refer to him as Kesk. He will be the instrument through which we will discover the trigger for your power. Pain is evidently not useful in its own right. Ergo, we will examine hatred. Anger. Fear. Release her."
The weight of the spell and the pressure of the cambion's hand lifted, and I gulped down the stagnant air. The stench of the half-fiend next to me was overpowering as he unlocked the manacles around my wrists.
I slumped to the floor. An explosion of pain rocked my head again. The room whirled around me, and what little was left in my stomach came back up again, burning my split lips. The chain gauntlets and another heap of chain which could only be his mail shirt were casually tossed next to me.
"Begin."
Before I was aware what was happening, the cambion hauled me up by my hair, grinning wickedly, and threw me against the wall. I hit face first and felt my nose break with a wet crunch and another explosion of pain. Blood poured over my lip, and for a moment, I was stunned.
Long fingers, capped with talons which dug into my scalp, twined into my hair and scored grooves across my skin. I gasped, and heard him grin, tightening his grip momentarily before hauling me up against him, arm pinned behind my back. He turned me to face the mage. My eyebrow had split and blood seeped into my good eye, mercifully blurring that analytical stare and warped face. He had parchment in his hand, and a quill. Notes. He was taking notes on my torture.
"Do your recall your travelling companions?"
I said nothing, whimpering slightly as the cambion twisted my arm further.
"You will answer when spoken to, or there will be consequences."
The cambion wrenched my arm and with a sickening pop, dislocated my shoulder. I cried out.
"Do you remember your companions?"
I nodded as best I was able.
"Your friend Imoen?"
I hesitated a fraction too long, and my captor wrenched the arm again. Purple lights flashed in front of my eyes and I screamed.
"Yes! Gods..."
My throat was raw enough for the prayer to come out cracked, and the mage looked momentarily taken aback.
"Gods? No. There is but one god who can help you now, and he is bound within your blood. It is really in your best interests to aid this research. Now. Imoen. Consider that she is even as we speak, watching you murder the rashemeni witch. Slowly."
I froze.
"Observe."
The cambion hoisted me up painfully as the mage swept his hand over thin air. An image swirled, then solidified.
Imoen. Chained, as I had been, to a wall. Screaming, tears streaming down her face.
Dynaheir, strapped, as I had been, to a bench. Her stomach, a bloody mess, her insides half pulled out. She was screaming too.
Minsc, caged and furiously raging. Throwing himself against the bars again and again, to get to his witch.
And standing over Dynaheir, smiling wickedly, a perfect image of myself, eyes ablaze as I swept one of the mage's blades down to gouge out her eyes.
I tried to turn away. Gods, I tried. My stomach revolted, and I closed my eyes, but the cambion held my head firmly towards the image, and nothing could shut out the screaming. Rage burned inside me again, hatred for this man who used me and taunted me. The pains in my own body receded, the blood pounded fiercely in my temples and I screamed in fury. I struggled furiously against the cambion, fighting against his grasp and the empty sickness which welled up inside me. Even with the rage which overcame me, my struggles must have seemed pitifully weak to the half-fiend warrior. I sank my teeth into the arm around me, clawing at him, lashing my feet out to kick him, anything to get out of his iron grip and throw myself at my tormentor. He grabbed my dislocated arm and shoved my body away from him, wrenching the damaged joint, then yanked me back and twisted. I felt the bones in my forearm snap, but the rage gave me strength, and I ignored the mounting pain. I pushed away from him, even as he shoved me to the floor, kicking me hard in the stomach. Winded, I tried to move forward, tripped, stumbled towards the mage in murderous fury, but sharp talons grabbed my collarbone, digging in through muscle and tendons, gouging bloody holes in my shoulder. That finally did stop me dead, as my vision went entirely white, and my body spasmed. I think I screamed. The cambion yanked me backwards by the bloody holes in my shoulder and smacked me to the floor with a punch. I lay, barely breathing, barely able to move, stunned and tasting blood. My own blood.
"Good. This has been useful. We will continue."
I heard footsteps, and a door slamming, as lights burst in front of my eyes. For a moment, there was blissful silence, then the clawed fingers wrapped in my hair, digging into my scalp again, and the cambion hauled me up. He threw me towards a table I hadn't known was there, scattering trays of impliments, and knocking what little wind I had out of me. I heard him stride up behind me, slamming my head back down into the table, then pausing. Roughly, the talons traced the lines of the tattoos on my bare back - a great tree-like vine growing up from my left hip to my right shoulder blade. I heard him growl with what could have been laughter, then speak for the first time.
"Ink fades, little mortal. How would you like me to make your pretty little design more permenant?"
My arms were pinned under me as he drove his talons deep into my flesh, dragging them along the intricate lines of the tattoo. I tried to deny him the pleasure of my scream, but before a minute was out I broke. I felt his claws slice through muscle and sinew, I swear I felt them scrape bone on my ribs as he traced out a hideous mockery of my design. The pain made me dizzy again, but every time I started to pass out, he raked the talons of his free hand down my dislocated arm, and the shock snapped me back awake. Long before he was done, my back and legs were slick with blood. He pressed up against it, inhaling the scent of it from my neck. The stench of rotting meat became almost unbearable.
"You know what the price was for my obedience to your master, little mortal?"
I whimpered as he slipped my sodden breeches down over my hips and brought himself to me. I don't know how long it lasted, but he wasn't gentle. I pressed my face into the table and bit down on my lip, but I was broken, and terrified, and couldn't help but scream.
He threw me bodily into the corner of the room, bruised, naked and bleeding; torn up inside and out. My head cracked the wall again, and blackness rose up to meet me.
I awoke again to a face leaning over me in the dark, and lashed out. Before I had time to realise I wasn't bruised or bleeding, my hand was up, smacking into the face over mine, and I was scrambling backwards, trailing blankets. There was a moment of hideous confusion, and then the scene became familiar and I realised where I was. The woodland where we had made camp was serene, peaceful in the darkness. The fire glowed, only embers now, but warm enough to keep away the autumn chill in the air. My companions slept hunkered down in bedrolls by the fire. All except one. He sat back a few feet away, wincing in pain, hand over his bloodied nose. And I crouched, hyperventilating, shaking, half naked, a few paces back from the head of my bedroll.
"Oh, Gods..." I moved forward, trying to calm my pounding heart and steady my frayed nerves, to look at his nose. "Is it broken?"
"Just bleeding, my raven. 'Tis no harm done." The bard had already produced a cloth from somewhere to staunch the flow of blood.
"Sorry."
I sat back on my bedroll, pulling the blankets over my bare legs, and rubbed my hands over my face. He slipped down gracefully to sit cross-legged across from me, holding the cloth to his nose. I said nothing, but sat, face in hands, gazing at the ground for a while.
The bleeding stopped, and he wiped the last of the blood from his nose.
The smell of it sickened me.
He leaned back and gazed up at the sky.
"Restless nights are becoming a way of life for you, my raven."
"So it would seem."
Embers in the firepit crackled and popped.
"Dreams of your sister again? Cryptic messages?"
My gaze flickered to where my sister lay sleeping by the fire. I wondered if she, too, was restless, haunted by dreams of torture and death. The loss of my soul seemed to have intensified the darkness in my mind a thousandfold, but then, Imoen had never been as dark as me. Hell, she only had one kind of taint in her blood to deal with.
"Not really."
I've never been an open person. A lot of people will tell you I've never been a nice person, either. I certainly don't make a habit of pouring out my heart and soul to people. Haer'Dalis was simply pleasant to talk to. He had a way with words. Actors so often do.
"But dreams of darkness, nevertheless."
I glanced up at him, but he was still staring at the sky. Viconia shifted in her trance, muttering something in Drow.
"My life does seem inexorably drawn towards darkness in all areas lately." I murmured.
The bard chuckled.
"Chaos, my raven. Entropy. The darkness is more often followed by the light than more of the dark. Eternal darkness would be just another form of order in itself." Deep aqua coloured eyes met my gold ones, and white teeth flashed in the gloom as he grinned. "And you are wonderfully chaotic."
I couldn't match his smile.
"I am born of murder, to a line already born of evil. Even were I not a Bhaalspawn, what life would I really have? I couldn't live as you do, I don't have the skills." I rubbed the back of my neck, then grimaced, feeling the scar over my tattoo, and pulled my hand away.
"You are a prime, tiefling or no. You can have no concept of the worlds beyond this one. The state of things changes constantly, and there is always somewhere and someone willing to overlook even the basest of natures for the moment. Observe things as they are. The future is oblivion for all of us, my raven. Why spend your fleeting time here in misery?"
I stared at him for a long while.
"I don't know whether to feel comforted or scared."
He grinned again.
"And thus, chaos reigns, inside and out." He paused, hesitating a moment. Unusual for him. "Your neck bothers you. Are you wounded?"
I froze.
"No."
He frowned.
"Usually your words are more persuasive. You are a much more accomplished liar than that."
"Don't push it."
My voice came out harsher than I had intended. He shrugged.
"As you wish."
I yawned suddenly. The fear of the dreams still lurked in the back of my mind, but it was subdued enough to rest. I shuffled back into my bedroll, feeling a little bad for cutting the conversation short so abruptly. But not too bad. I leaned back, and glanced at him, but he was already standing up.
"This sparrow flies to his nest as well, my raven. And prays your dreams are sweeter for his song."
I raised an eyebrow at him.
"Goodnight, 'Dalis."
But I couldn't help but smile a little inwardly. And as he woke Minsc for the next watch, sleep came to me peacefully for the first time in days.