The Cell, Part One

Mrg... Updating regularily is hard. Sorry for the shortness and crappiness of this chapter- I am sick and also overloaded by homework. Life explodes. Anyways, I'll just go on to everyone's favorite part...

Margaret's Question Corner!

Matchi is treasurer Machi. The misspelling is due in part to my stupidity and my horrible phonetic tendencies. As for the reasoning behind the Ritsu arc... I needed someone who was part of things, but wasn't actually at Cherry Hills. (For now obvious reasons.) The Ritsu arc will reveal much about many, many things. Mwahahaha...

As for your third question/complaint... Ayame is a good character. He is fun to write, and I look forward to doing it again in the future. (Insert evil laugh here.)


He awoke in darkness. The world was blank, a vast, empty void, filled only by the chill drip of water down stone walls and the distant echo of screaming.

The empty world span about him, lurid splashes of colour flickering across his vision as his head throbbed. He bit back a groan, rolling his head back off his chest and almost gagging as the bloody lump the Creshak had given him hit hard stone.

Once the unsettling waves of pain had eased, he forced himself to ignore the wound to his skull and focus on the other myriad aches and pains sending bolts of black lightning through his veins. His shoulders ached, and his wrists. They were above his head, stretched painfully as they supported his weight. There was stone under his feet, rough rock scraping his bare ankle. He carefully stood, wincing at the battle-stiffness that still pulled at his muscles.

With his feet beneath him, he could lower his arms to about shoulder level, the chains that held him clinking loudly in the darkness as he tried to stretch away the pain. His armour and his weapons had been removed, along with his boots. His undershirt stuck to his skin, damp and cold and making him more miserable than being shirtless would have.

Other than the lump and the raw chaffing on his wrists, he seemed more or less intact.

It seemed fairly obvious where he was, and what had happened to him. He'd been taken prisoner by the Torrac and was now mouldering away in some bleak dungeon behind enemy lines. The only question was why. Why had they gone to the trouble of bringing him here when they could have just killed him? They probably wanted information on the Sakuran defences and such. But if that was the case, why not interrogate him out in the field instead of bringing him all the way here? Wherever here was.

They couldn't know who he really was. Nobody knew, especially not the Torrac. To them, he was just a commander, a Souris Knight, important in his role but not by birthright.

He absently wondered what they'd do if they realized they had captured the third... Second in line for the Sakuran throne.

He couldn't be sure how much time passed. The echoes of the tortured screams of the other prisoners seemed to go through a disconcerting cycle. There would be long stretches of silence followed by cries so violent that it gave him shivers. Eventually the screams would die off into a sort of shuddering sob, somehow even more horrible than the screams. Then it would go silent again, stretching on almost into forever.

Each time the screams started, they were a little bit closer.

He could almost make out the words coming though the thick stone walls when the door opened. The dim torchlight of the hallway was so bright it almost blinded him, making him flinch away and squeeze his eyes shut against it. He heard a softly spoken voice, the voice of a woman. She padded in, booted feet shuffling quietly on the floor.

He pried open his eyes to look at the woman entering his cell. At first she was just a slender silhouette, cut crosswise by a dark line of a tray. She smelt like Isuzu, of blood and sweat and tears and the rancid stench of medicines. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he began to pick out more detail. Her long blood-brown hair was braided into rope over her shoulder, tied off with a plain black ribbon. Her skin was pale for a Torrac, not nearly as pale as his own, but rivalling most of the pure-blood Sakurans like his 'father'. She was fairly slight, only coming up to his shoulder, and yet as she stalked towards him, she seemed less like a slender woman and more like a long dusken shadow, flickering over the damp stone.

She set the tray down on the ground just out of his reach, shooting him a strange look with deep grey eyes flashing in the torchlight. She plucked a little sea-green jar from the myriad arranged upon the tray and straightened, looking into his eyes with her shoulders back and head held high.

"You're not so scary, are you, mua'na berek?" The woman murmured, bizarrely long fingers twisting the cap out of the bottle. "Miko is a fool to fear you."

She casually flipped the cap back onto the tray. One of her thin hands came up to caress the side of his face, long nails running over the bandage plastered to his face with his own blood. She caught the edge and pulled, ripping it off and the stitches along with it. He felt the hot blood coursing down his face, gritting his teeth and forcing himself to remain impassive.

"Heh..." The woman laughed, scraping her fingers through his blood and staining them red. "You're not scary at all."

Her fingers dug into the gap of his jaw, forcing him to open his mouth. She jammed the bottle through his lips, pouring the acrid liquid down his throat. He gagged, swallowed, coughed. The woman laughed, dropping her hand from his face as he retched against the almost alcoholic burn making it's way down his throat.

"The taste is unpleasant, but the elixir works wonders." She tossed her braid over her shoulder, full lips smirking in the most unsettling manner. "By the time Naga'rath gets to you, you'll be fit for whatever he wants to throw at you."

She retrieved the tray and sauntered back to the open door, slipping through with only a smirk and a backward glance. The door shut behind her, leaving him in darkness once again.

Yuki slumped against the wall, the burn slowly spreading through his body and lighting each and every one of his veins on fire. He felt his wounds begin to heal under the influence of the diabolic potion, threads of tissue wrapping around one another and stitching his broken skin back together. He bit his lip, tasted blood, then felt his flesh begin to heal around his teeth.

He ripped his teeth free and resisted the urge to scream.


Characters used thus far- Margaret's Cheiko, who I have decided is cool and will play a bigger part than originally intended. Margaret's Yoshiro shall be the politician, and Kuroneko Hikage's Cyress shall be the guard. (I know he's supposed to be a nurse, but this fits better into my world.) I still need a nice nurse and the young ward, by the way.