Sylvanni woke up, back in her cell, which in and of itself was an odd experience. Not a resurrection back up out of death, not the horrific torture room, just a normal awakening from unconsciousness. A sharp scent hit her nose as she breathed in and she quickly reached up to pull the now-spent sedative rag from her face. She couldn't fully remember having been brought back to life or what had happened after her 'show of loyalty.' Whatever they'd given her to knock her out must have clouded her memory.
Out of some vain, foolish sense of hope, she held her hand out and tried to call her Ghost to it. But of course, he didn't come. Was I really expecting that to work?
She slowly pushed herself into a sitting position and was surprised when something pinched at her lower chest. Frowning, she looked down, noticing that her garments were different. Rather than the undershirt and soft pants that she had been wearing during her captivity up to this point—the same things she normally wore beneath her armor in the field—she had now been dressed in something distinctly more Fallen.
A rough-spun garments of loose brown fabric tied tightly with marigold wraps acted as a makeshift sleeveless shirt and trousers, though the rigged contraption of cloth pulled in strange places when she moved. She half-feared the whole thing would come untied and fall off if she pulled it the wrong way. Over top of the awkwardly assembled clothing was a more presentable long tunic in the House Kings golden color, painted with the white House symbol at the knee-length ends. Upon closer look, she realized it was fully open on both sides, more of a tabard than a tunic.
Securing this tabard—uniform? livery?—was a strange contraption wrapped around her lower chest and upper waist, and the source of the pinching discomfort she'd noticed. It appeared to be one solid band of a bronze-colored metal, bent and warped to completely encircle her body. It had been fitted to the narrowest part of her waist, and therefore dug in sharply at her lower chest and at the top of her hips, ill-fitting on both sides.
Reaching behind, she felt around at the back of the flat plate, trying to find a joining mechanism, some kind of lock or a clasp. Instead, the metal felt crumpled where the two ends met, almost as though it had been wrenched into place by force. This thing, whatever it was, wouldn't be removed by normal means, she realized with some discomfort. At the very least, the pain from the poor fit of it was nothing compared to the tortures she'd been through. She could deal with an over-tight wrap of metal if it meant no one was killing her in slow, creative ways anymore.
She pushed herself back to lean against the rough stone wall of her cell, pulling her knees up in front of her and trying not to think about being drugged unconscious while her Fallen captors stripped and redressed her in their colors. The thought of Eliksni claws on her skin made her nauseous, despite the endless other violations they'd inflicted upon her already.
Lowest of House, Erxaris had said. Kings Slave. And Sylvanni had promised to serve, hadn't she? Paid their price in blood by her own hand, even. Not that the empty words about "loyalty" held any kind of weight after what House Kings had put her through, but if it would mean an end to the ceaseless cycle of pain and death, she could play the role. She could duck her head, let her captors believe they'd tamed a Guardian into something docile and obedient, endure whatever other humiliations they had in store for her. She didn't have shame left, after all that.
That is, after all, what I've always been good at, isn't it? Following orders. Doing what I'm told. She'd bide her time as long as she needed to.
"Well, well, Duv. I thought for a moment there that we'd lost you." Uldren's face appeared in the barred gap between their cells, clearly wondering where she'd been. His eyebrows raised when he saw her. "You've clearly found yourself something like a promotion. New clothes, even a cot to sleep on. What'd you have to give them for that?"
Sylvanni glanced beneath her, not having even noticed the rough bundle of a cot she'd been lying on. It wasn't by any means comfortable, but it was technically softer than the floor. She sensed the hook in his question, trying to goad her into giving him an answer. He wanted to know if they'd broken her, if she'd given in to their demands. After everything that had happened, though, Uldren Sov's needling barely registered. Nothing mattered anymore, not him, not the Fallen, not anything.
"You don't know what you're talking about," she said blankly. She just kept staring forward at an unfocused spot between her knees.
He cocked his head, eyes narrowing. "Don't I? You couldn't have been gone for more than a week and then you come back wearing their colors, offered even a meager bit of comfort. Is this the measure of the Traveler's chosen?"
"Maybe it is, then. What do you care?" She could hear that same empty tone in her voice, the words feeling as though they're spoken by another person entirely.
He scoffed. "One week, that's all it takes to break a Guardian, then. I'd have thought one with centuries of war and blood behind her would have greater fortitude than that. After all, I've been here longer than you, and yet, somehow they didn't break me."
"You have no right to judge me," she snarled, a hot anger flashing within her unexpectedly. She started to lean forward toward him and then winced when that awkward band cuts into her again. "You couldn't fathom what I have endured, Sov, because you're still alive. Whatever you think they've done to you, it couldn't even begin to come close. Do not speak to me of fortitude!"
He smiled then, but it wasn't the hard smirk she was used to from the stuck-up prince, but something softer. Sympathetic. She thought the torture must have made her delirious, the expression was so inexplicable. "There she is," he said gently. "Keep that spirit up, Duv. We're both going to need it."
Her face twisted, realizing what he'd done, how intentional the goading had been. She curled inward again, feeling a terrible vulnerability in how easily she was manipulated right now, even if it was ostensibly for her benefit. "For all you claim you haven't broken," she said with a quiet bitterness, "you seem to have been plenty loose-lipped with secrets about me."
The statement seemed to catch him off guard, and he pulled back from the bars a bit. "What are you talking about?"
She laughed once, an empty sound again. "You'd deny it? House Kings all of a sudden knows things like how much sedative it takes to knock out a Guardian, knows how to disable Ghosts? You're the only person I've ever met who could do that. How convenient that the Kings' Splicers can do it too, now that you're here. But no, just a coincidence. You haven't broken under the pressure, right?"
"I…." He paused, eyeing her more closely. "What is around your waist?"
She almost snapped at him again, knowing he was trying to change the topic, but the knowing tone in his voice stopped her. She changed her sitting position to make it more visible, looking down again. "I don't know what it is. I woke up with it. Some kind of… decorative armor, maybe."
"Would you look at that," he said cryptically, making her seethe again. "They must have needed to make it custom for you."
"I know you only talk like that just to taunt that you know things that I don't," she says. "And I don't appreciate it."
Uldren didn't answer that accusation either. "If you wish to know if I could identify it, you only need to ask." As she opened her mouth to do just that, he cut her off with the answer. "It's a prisoner's stay, I believe. I've not seen one used before, but I've heard descriptions before. Curious that they would place one on you."
"That isn't exactly descriptive, Sov." Her patience with his toying responses was wearing very thin.
"By all means, Guardian, allow me to elucidate." He leaned back, settling into a more comfortable position as he started to talk. "When a House takes prisoners, as you are no doubt already aware, standard practice is to dock their lower arms, a demotion to drekh."
She rolled her eyes at his clearly Eliksni pronunciation on the last word, but didn't interrupt. Show off.
"For higher ranked prisoners, however—Barons, Archons, possibly a Captain if they troublesome enough—docking arms on its own isn't sufficient. Large Eliksni like that have such ether-rich blood that their arms would simply grow back after docking; it's the starvation rations of a drekh that keep them from regrowing theirs. So, after docking a powerful prisoner, the stumps are wrapped in a stay like that to forcibly keep them from regenerating until their ether levels have dropped to a much weaker state."
She put a hand to the side of her waist, trying in vain to adjust the uncomfortable tightness of the stay. "That doesn't make sense. I don't have an extra pair of arms under here to regrow. And even if I did, Guardian healing on its own doesn't regrow limbs the way the Fallen can. You need a resurrection to fix something like that. They… specifically tested that."
Uldren made an interested noise at that, like it was a fact he was tucking away for later use, then continued. "Well, as you might guess, a stay is more than just a practical restraint. It is also a symbol. It's a status symbol for the capturing House, to have taken a prisoner powerful enough to need one. They're usually constructed of bright metals like yours, to draw the eye to the docking, a way of shaming a once-great foe. It is a simultaneous humiliation of the prisoner and a trophy for the captor. In truth, Guardian, you ought to be flattered, I think."
"Flattered, to be paraded about as a powerful enemy laid low," she said bitterly. "Somehow I don't see that as a compliment."
He chuckled. "To each their own. Being a prisoner of status is still some kind of status. I say use whatever advantages you can get your hands on down here. I doubt we'll have much chance of getting out of here if you don't."
She gave him a very long and hard look at that phrasing. "We, Sov? What makes you think I'd break you out if I was escaping? I feel like I've learned my lesson about what happens to people who try to rescue you."
He feigned hurt, an insincere little pout on his face. "After all we've been through together down here, you're still hung up about the tiny disagreement we had on Mars? You wouldn't really leave me behind in here when you make your grand Guardian break out, would you?"
"You tell yourself that, Your Highness. See if I don't leave your royal ass to rot."
That got another smirk out of him. He always seemed most pleased when she was being snappish back to him. "You'd miss my sparkling sense of companionship in your travels."
"I think we should resume that language practice we were working on, actually. Can you tell me how you'd say 'Go fuck yourself' in Eliksni?"
He laughed, and then to her surprise, chattered and clicked an Eliksni phrase back to her, which her vague grasp of grammatical markers let her deduce was probably exactly what she'd asked. "You should note," he said mock-seriously, "that the phrase in our language may be an imperative, but in Eliksni, it is interrogative. Technically, it's a suggestion grammatically. In case you were confused about the conjugation."
"I'm sure it would have kept me up at night wondering," she said, rolling her eyes.
"In fact, if you want to be really vulgar about it in Eliksni, you should actually put the phrase in the most formal register, which would be–" Another set of clicked words followed, similar enough in sound for Sylvanni to recognize that they were the same phrase, if slightly tweaked. She tried to repeat the sounds softly to herself, trying to figure out where the word breaks were, what order they were appearing in. This might have started out as a way to insult him, but she did have a lot of learning to do still.
"You should repeat it back louder," Uldren suggested when he noticed her mumbling. "If you're wanting an instructor's corrections, that is. You'll never learn just talking to yourself."
She looked him dead on, then with as much precision as she could muster, she told him to go fuck himself in Eliksni. With a grin, he corrected her vowels, to which she quipped that vowels in Eliksni should hardly count since there were so few of them. From there, it was easy to slip into simply another lesson, and though Sylvanni would never admit it, she was unspeakably grateful for the distraction it lent.
For all Uldren Sov's flaws and their thorny history, he was the only ally in this place that she had.
