Razor Blade Eyes
The Shades
Not alive
Not dead
Allies of Gaoru
They are the remembrance
What horrors lie within?
What can they do?
I said I'll save you
And I swear I will
You will want to cry with what you see
Or hear
Into the bottom of madness
How can one stay sane
With all this hell?
And what of the Brehul?
Will they stand aside?
And so the journey of the night descends
And all the shades are gone
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Razor Blade Eyes
Exposed Through Shadow
Heaven
Bend to take my hand
And
lead me through the fire
Be
the long awaited answer
To
a long and painful fight
Truth
be told I tried my best
But
somewhere long the way
I
got caught up in all there was to offer
But
the cost was so much more than I could bear
Kaos was next to him when he woke.
Link rubbed his head and slowly looked around. He shuddered and sat up. Kaos in her Huolf form steadied him. He moaned and rubbed his head again.
"Are you okay?" She asked.
"Maybe..."
"What did they do to you?"
Link closed his eyes. He saw, flashes...of things...
He remembered little. Kaos tried almost everything she could think of to try and get him to remember, but it was never more than a flash of an image. Kaos was not surprised. Anything the Brehul did was normally too horrific to remember. Memories were suppressed by the victim. Kaos shuffled Link into a little grove deep within the Lost Woods.
Kaos began to check him over for injuries.
Link removed his boots and his gauntlets. Kaos inspected his palms. A few scratches here and there but nothing terrible. There were bruises on his wrists from different shackles, obviously there was a new pair everyday. His feet were unscathed, slightly calloused but normal. Kaos ordered him to remove his tunic. He blushed slightly but knew better than to have her take it off for him.
Kaos carefully examined the tunic. It was stained from being submerged in blood, but the green color would return after a bit of cleansing. She checked his limbs for broken bones. Finding none, she moved on to the next bit.
"Strip for me." She said.
"You have to pay. I don't strip for just anyone."
They laughed for a moment or two. This was much needed humor. Then, Link reluctantly removed his white leggings and his white shirt.
Kaos was floored. Link looked away, ashamed. There were numerous lacerations and bruises all over his body. Many of them were on his back and his legs. Some had healed, and some were growing infected. There were a few tears where the Brehul King had tried to rip flesh from the fairy boy. Kaos gently caressed Link, wrapping her arms around him as if he was a child.
Her curiosity melded with rage. She wanted to know what they did to him, and she wanted them dead. But first, he needed healing, and this grove was just the place to do it.
Link lay down on the soft grass while Kaos recited her spell.
"O Mother Gaia
One who bestows life and love
One who created us
One of and yet not of your children needs aid
He has fought like us
Thought he walks the path of a hero
The Brehul have destroyed him
He has fought for you
Respecting you though he be not of you
The Brehul slew his spirit
O Mother Gaia
Hear my plea
We request aid
For we cannot survive without you."
The ground exploded with stardust. That stardust seeped into Link's wounds. He winced as his skin stretched over his wounds and scars. Within minutes, there was no sign that he was ever injured. Kaos thanked the earth and the grove around her before turning to Link.
"Get dressed. We're moving."
Link was soon dressed and Kaos was leading him deeper into the forest.
"Where are we going?" Link asked.
"To see Phendra, Queen of the Shades. They can reveal what you see flashes of."
They came to a sacred glen. There was a deep pool of crystal clear water, and next to the pool was a great, gnarled oak tree. Kaos walked forwards.
"Halt! Who treads in the land of the Shades?" A whispery and dead voice called.
"Phendra! It is I! Kaos!"
A figure jumped from the tree before them. It was dead. It bore a human-like anatomy. The head was simply a skull with pointed teeth. The neck, shoulders, and chest were still flesh-like, though there were great stich-like scars on them. It bore a female figure, a bit of black scale-flesh covering its breasts. Below that was just the spinal cord leading to a belt that housed two straps of the scale-flesh, one in front and one behind. It was flesh up to the knees, where it was torn away in favor of plain bone. The arms were all bone as well. It had two bone-dragon wings and wore a crown of barbed wire.
"Kaos! It has been too long since you have come."
"I know Phendra. We need your aid."
At that moment, the Shades began to appear. They had dragon-skulls for heads, skulls no bigger than a horse head. They had arm-like things, with three great claws for fingers. The rest of them were shadow. They whisped here and there, vanishing then reappearing.
"Is that who I think he is?" Phendra asked.
"He is Link, the Hero of Time."
"Hello." Link said meekly. He felt uneasy.
"Then let him be welcome here. What aid do you need Kaos?"
"The Brehul did...things to him. I need to know what."
The Shades stopped. The Brehul were hated amongst the shades. There was such hate that they would do anything to destroy them. Phendra nodded. They took Link to one of the tallest limbs on the old oak, directly over the pool.
"You will be submerged. Do not panic. Let your body pass out. No harm will come to you. Your mind will be forced to witness what you have been through. The pool will return you to the surface when it is over." Phendra said.
The Shades gathered around the pool. This was a ritual. They had to observe what was in the pool.
Link took a deep breath and fell from the branch.
The water was warm, like a bath. He sunk deeper and deeper, mind eventually flowing away and what emerged was hell.
Kaos watched from the tree. Her mind was mortified at what she saw. The Brehul had submerged Link in those tanks. They had waited until he passed out, sometimes it took several minutes for this to happen. Once out, they strapped his soaked and unconscious body to a table. Veldre would wait until he was almost conscious before the horrors began.
There was a hook.
There was a whip.
There was a sword.
The whip came first. It lashed and hissed each time it snaked through the air and at the barely alert fairy boy. He would scream in pain. The whip would recede, and then the sword came. It was almost impossible to follow with the naked eye, as the Brehul King moved it with such speed that the wounds showed up after he had put the sword away. The cuts seemed to explode with blood.
Then...the hook...
Veldre had three of these hooks on each hand. It clawed at Link's flesh, ripping through his skin and into his muscles. There were exposed organs and once, the dreaded hooks caught themselves on Link's ribcage. Link screamed in pain as Veldre kept tugging at them to unhook the bones, but it just resulted in tearing more and more.
One this was done, the Brehul onlookers licked his wounds, drawing strength. When this was done, he was cast into the tanks again. The water-like liquid would heal his wounds, and then the process repeated itself.
But it changed once.
There was another Hylian on the table. Link was dragged from the tank. His eyes were forced open and he was gagged. There were several Brehul standing around. Veldre took a long knife. He would cut into this screaming Hylian woman and then ask
"Do you see?"
Cut
"Do you see?"
When the woman was dead, Veldre took Link into a preserved place of forest, like a blighted glen. Then, Link was raped. Kaos almost vomited. It was sickening to watch. Once Link had been broken, lying on the ground of this Brehul-made hellhole, he was tortured even more. Veldre put a strap of leather that had been tailored into a choke collar on the poor fairy-boy. Link was beaten like he was a stray dog, strangled repeatedly before being raped again and again.
He was then locked in the cage that Kaos had found him in. Fendri would constantly lower him into the pool of blood and lick him clean. Then he had been rescued.
Link floated to the surface of the pool. The Shades scooped him up and carried him off to be dried off and woken up Kaos and Phendra descended to the ground, where Kaos retched.
"I'll kill him when I get my Chrnolt claws on him." Kaos said.
"I wish for that." Phendra said, angry red lights glowing in her eye sockets.
"I need a plan."
"That we can work on."
"I need an army. There are thousands of them, and only thirty of us, at most."
Phendra knelt to one knee.
"We, the Shades, pledge our allegiance to the armies of Gaia."
Phendra then changed into that of a Shade. It was her other form. But it was not at small as the others. The Shade Phendra was twenty feet long at least. Her dragon-skull head was five feet and her claw hands were a formidable opponent. She still had the barbed-wire crown, it resting around one of the dragon horns.
"When he wakes, we shall begin planning."
Kaos nodded.
That night, when night fell anyways, Kaos wrapped her arms around the sleeping fairy boy, protecting him from the world.
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Chapter done!
More to come.
The Shades have risen...