Author's Note: The Disclaimer is on the prologue, and here's the torture warning. It's here, and in other chapters, but not horribly graphic.
HARVEST REBOUND:
A TALE OF THE KING'S BLADES
Part One: Roland
The world was spinning, and breathing was well nigh impossible.
He tasted blood, sharp and metallicy in his throat. It was a familiar taste, now, almost comforting in its normality. He was losing track of time, but there were a few constants in his waning life. The pain was one of them.
The inevitability of the torture was another.
Blood splattered into his mouth, fresh and wet and sticky. New blood. He forced his dizzy eyes open, realizing belatedly that a whip had struck him in the face while he'd been too dizzy to realize. This pain was sharp, poignant, nothing like the slightly dull and familiar agony his of day to day existence. It made a grunt of pain rise in his throat, but even in his half-conscious state, he fought that back, forcing his eyes open.
Something dark wandered its way into his eyes when he blinked, and it took him a long moment to realize that it was blood. An even longer moment passed before he could see through the grit that his fuzzy mind realized, again, was blood. Too much blood. He should have been dizzier than he was; small wonder that he had not passed out completely from the pain. Or from blood loss.
The whip struck again, distracting him before he could stop to figure out how or why he was still conscious. Then agony bled into gray dizziness, just as it always did. Everything began to fade together until it was all just one big blur of pain, one constant enemy to be fought and endured. Day in, day out. It was simple, really, if one knew how to concentrate.
If you had something to hold on to.
And he did.
Loyalty, some said, was better to receive than to give. But for some, the act of giving loyalty, of being faithful, was purpose enough. Perhaps it was a special breed of insanity, to hold oaths so close to the heart so that they meant more than life, but it gave him something to hold on to. Those oaths provided purpose, direction, motivation. And they were enough. They had to be. Despite the pain, the promises of relief if only he would betray—loyalty was enough. Even when the strikes of the whip fell into a rhythm, when the days went by without chance of rescue, loyalty was enough.
All Blades are born to die.