by AstroGirl
Durka says he wants information, Hynerian military secrets, but they both know it's a lie. Bishan, may his treacherous heart rot in his mange-blighted chest, has surely told the Peacekeepers anything they wished to know in exchange for inflicting this very suffering. And to Durka this is clearly a game, one whose pleasure is in the playing, not in the prize.
The torture is bad enough; Rygel certainly has no love of pain. But Hynerian physiology is tough, and one does not get to be Dominar without a special quality of toughness, it being necessary, sometimes literally, to claw one's way up over the struggling bodies of one's rivals. He simply endures the pain, imagining a future in which he will pay it back to Durka a hundred-fold, and such thoughts almost make the worst of it sweet.
It's the deprivation that threatens to undo him: the hunger, the thirst. Durka takes him to within a hairsbreadth of death by dehydration, to a place where water becomes the only thing that has ever mattered in his life, the thought of it circling like a whirlpool in his brain as his skin peels and cracks. His mind keeps returning to the memory of a blue slathlek he once saw stranded on a beach by some unforeseen surge of the tide, dying slowly in the sun. He gave little thought to it at the time, but he feels a kinship now with that distant, long-dead aquatic relative, as if he and it in some unexamined fashion share a soul.
When at last his throat is too constricted and dry to complain or even to beg, Durka gives him water. Icy torrents of it, unbearably cold on his flaking skin, fall over him like a flood of demonic rain. He swallows it greedily, even as it burns his lips and freezes his tongue. Durka watches and laughs.
The hunger does not stop. The sympathetic memory of the dying slathlek fades from his mind until, if he thinks of it at all, he thinks with longing of the flesh on its body, wasted on shore-mites and scavenging birds. He is utterly filled with the emptiness of his stomachs. He finds himself talking to them, swearing that if -- when -- he regains his freedom he will never deny them anything again, never permit them to be less than burstingly full. That he will savor every morsel of food, every taste, every texture, every glorious messy mouthful and never, ever hold anything back.
He has no idea how long he has been without nourishment when Durka looms before him, a dirty crust of some dry Peacekeeper-ration bread clutched in his taunting hand. Rygel's emaciated brain perceives him in disjointed hallucinatory images: he sits on a throne in the robes of a Dominar, his dead eye looking out from a face that is alternately Durka's, and Bishan's, and Rygel's own. "Just imagine," he says, his voice the hissing of a water-snake, "what your cousin must be doing right now. Dining on a feast of marjoules and finely aged wine. Having his way with your wives. Falling asleep, safe and secure, on his bed of polished gold. And you... have me. And this." He forces Rygel's mouth open with one hand and thrusts the crust deep into his throat as his skeletal jaws strain uselessly to snap and bite. Rygel chokes and gasps for air that will not come until, at last, Durka releases him and strikes him casually on the back. A desperate, explosive cough, and the bread flies free of his airway and lands across the room. Durka leaves it there, where Rygel can see it but not reach it. His fantasies over the next solar days alternate between having that morsel back in his own mouth and shoving it far enough down Durka's to rip apart his filthy Sebacean lungs.
Of course, Durka feeds him eventually. Rygel's death would deprive him of his favorite toy. "There," he says, spooning soft nutrient paste into Rygel's mouth with what might almost seem gentleness if it were not for the cruel set of his mouth. "There. You see? I feed you, I take care of you. Are we not friends?" Rygel knows that the bastard fully expects that one day he will say "yes" and mean it, and that will be the day that Durka can gloat about having broken him.
It will never happen. Rygel is quite capable of breaking; he retains enough self-awareness to understand that. He will cry, he will beg for death, he will admit his fear of Durka and his own humiliating powerlessness over the torments the Peacekeeper inflicts. He has done these things already. But he will never lose his power over himself, never give his soul to Durka to accompany his body. This he swears by all his ancestors.
If his life is now degradation and suffering, then so be it. It is still his life. And if the only realm he inhabits now is the realm of pain, than he will be Dominar of Pain.
He spits the food back in Durka's face.