Spoiler/Trigger Warning: offscreen medical torture, weighing of lives, past offscreen character death, past child neglect/malnutrition, beatings, and something I'm not too sure how to warn for but the third scene parallels the ultimate portal as well as Merlin's stabbing.

Krel was already sore before he got thrown into the cage and his face slammed against the glass. How strong was it, to take the force of his body like that?

Krel groaned as he pushed himself into a slightly more comfortable sitting position and winced as the cuts on his skin brushed against the various surfaces of the cage and the gown. He thought he had been uncomfortable before they had cut into him, due to how he wasn't used to and didn't like having so much skin exposed, but this was even worse. He ached and itched wherever the scientists who worked here had cut into his skin. Some cuts had been slices across the surface, and other cuts had been punctured holes. The punctures had hurt even worse than the slices at the time. Krel had ended up screaming until he had been slapped and gagged. Now, they were all similar levels of pain spread across his body.

"You okay?" the wizard asked. Krel glared at him. What sort of question was that? They were literally being tortured.

"What do you think?" Then again, the wizard looked human, so it was entirely possible that the scientists had gone easier on him than they had on Krel. "Are you?"

"No, and you're right. It was a stupid question," the wizard said forlornly before he turned away from Krel. By doing so, he gave Krel a better view of his face.

Maybe it was the lighting, or maybe Krel wasn't good at identifying human injuries, but it looked like the wizard was hurt. Bruised, probably, given the blotches on his face. Aside from the bruises, his skin seemed to blend in more with the white gown than it had been before the scientists had taken him away. If he was getting any sort of special treatment for looking human, it wasn't that much.

It was quiet as the wizard curled on himself. Good. Krel had time to think about how he and the wizard would escape, assuming Aja didn't come for Krel first.

No. That wasn't the plan. Krel was only supposed to plan for his own escape. Not that he should need to plan for his own escape, not when Aja and Zadra were coming for him.

Was it cruel to leave the wizard behind to be tortured and beaten? Yes. Yes it was.

Was it something Krel could and would do if it meant his own escape?

The wizard had yet to prove that he wasn't an idiot, or at least only the average amount of idiocy as everyone else on this mudball. But could Krel leave him behind?

Maybe. Probably. Especially if Krel and the wizard weren't together when Aja finally came and rescued Krel.

Krel didn't like how uncertain that answer was in his head.

Would Krel leave the wizard behind? Well, if Aja and Zadra came for him, he couldn't risk losing time and potentially his sister too just trying to save the wizard.

But what if Aja didn't come for him, and he had to escape on his own? (Which was nonsense, of course Aja would come for him. She had to. She was his sister. He would do the same for her, just his plan would involve more stealth and less fighting.) He didn't want to answer that to himself and thus admit the level of uncertainty.

The wizard's shoulders shook slightly as he made a small, wet, gasping noise. Krel sighed.

"I'm Krel, by the way."

The wizard turned back to Krel. Tears shone on his cheeks under the green lights of his cage, but he gave Krel a dazzling smile, nonetheless. In a wet voice he said, "I'm Hisirdoux, but everyone calls me Douxie."

Colonel Kubritz rubbed her temples. She could already feel a headache coming on; the new specimens were infuriating. Oh, it was interesting to study them. It was good to have taken back one of the ones who had broken in, and she hoped that by capturing him his friends would come back for him and the rest of them could be captured as well, but she had received so many complaints ever since they had gotten the two of them.

Apparently, the two new specimens kept having conversations. That had been the frequent complaint. Often, the specimens didn't have conversations, but they also didn't often have multiple new specimens at the same time. They'd get one specimen at a time, and it would call out for help, but it would eventually lose hope. And then, it'd be quiet. If it didn't lose hope on its own, then the soldiers and scientists were instructed to beat it into submission.

That was the other half of Kubritz's frustration. What didn't her men understand about using force to silent the specimens? They understood it when the specimens fought back – she had gone over the reports on these two. They had been beaten into submission. But talking in their cages, together, and her men suddenly forgot all their training and indoctrination.

Kubritz groaned. Stuart had been this frustrating as well, so it only made sense that his captured ally was following in his footsteps.

The last wizard they'd captured had been similarly frustrating. He'd been a man in his thirties who had had the audacity to be working as an elementary school teacher in southern Nevada. He'd been caught creating bubbles out of nothing to entertain his students.

He had claimed to be a US citizen, that he deserved better. He was beaten and told that only humans could be citizens. It took a long time for him to learn that lesson.

He'd call out for help, and he was beaten. He stopped calling out for help.

He'd try to help and soothe all the aliens near him. He was beaten for it. Eventually he finally shut up, though that may have been the fact that the aliens refused to respond to him.

And a week after he stopped fighting back, his magic faded down to a faint trickle when he was allowed access to it. Kubritz had been the one to talk to him about it.

"Magic is emotion," he had said to her in such a hollow voice that it still felt mocking years later, "and you've made me apathetic."

His body was disposed of a week later. Even in death, he'd held onto his secrets; not even his corpse showed signs of what the differences between wizards and humans were.

Hopefully the new specimen would show more promise than just being a nuisance, showing no results and talking to the other nuisance.

She sat up straight as an idea came to her.

"Magic is emotion?" she said to herself. "Well, I bet I can use this emotional connection to my advantage."

Despite all the centuries that had passed, gruel didn't change. That was what they had been given to eat – a single bowl of gruel for each of them. Douxie was pretty sure that the rats that Archie used to catch for him to eat would have been more nourishing given how small the bowls were. Still, Douxie was thankful to finally eat.

"Fligshaag," Krel said from his cage. Douxie looks over to see him making a face. Ah, so he finally stopped poking at his food and started eating it. "I knew this was going to taste bad, but that bad?"

The taste of gruel hadn't really changed over the centuries, though Douxie hadn't tasted much of it given how quickly he had eaten his. "At least it's not moldy. Or at least it didn't look that way," Douxie said to him. Some of the personnel walked towards them; most of them had their hands behind their backs., and a woman dressed in green trailed behind them.

Krel gave him a concerned look. "What's 'moldy'?"

Douxie didn't get a chance to reply before one of the personnel grabbed Krel, kicking over his gruel. "I was going to eat that, you klebso!" he yelled.

Krel was thrown to the ground with a grunt. The one who had thrown him stepped back. As Krel tried to push himself to a kneeling position, the other personnel surrounded him in a near-perfect circle. The only gap was a perfect window between Krel and Douxie. Outside this window Douxie noticed that the personnel were holding metal batons.

No.

Oh, no.

As Douxie raised his voice to warn Krel, they brought their batons down to strike him.

Krel cried out in pain and curled in on himself, tucking his limbs up to cover his chest, seeming not to care about the other parts of his body.

"Stop!" Douxie cried out, slamming one of his fists into the glass of his cage. "You're hurting him!"

They continued beating Krel.

"What do you sick bastards even want?" Douxie slammed his other hand against the glass. "Stop it!"

Douxie saw the lights in the cuffs around his wrists dim until they were nonexistent, but he didn't register them. All he wanted for them to stop hurting Krel. He wanted for himself and Krel to be free from the pain and torture the soldiers were inflicting on them. He wanted them to be free and safe and away from here.

One of the batons struck near Krel's eye.

"STOP!" Douxie yelled, his voice louder than what his vocal cords could normally produce. He barely had time to see his eyes turn blue in his reflection in the glass before it shattered as a wave of blue magic burst outwards and broke the glass. It left Krel unharmed, but glass hit the soldiers and magic knocked all but the furthest of them over. Arcane symbols – the same symbols that adorned his bracer – maintained circular orbits around Douxie.

Krel stretched out from his position and looked up at Douxie in awe. Douxie gazed back at him and gave him a gentle smile as Douxie began to rise to his feet. He felt powerful, like no one could hurt him or anyone he cared about again. He and Krel would walk out of here, and Douxie would protect them both.

The one standing soldier put his foot on Krel's throat (and why hadn't Krel protected his throat; he had protected his chest but not his throat). Something twisted and broke within Douxie, and another wave of anger and magic rose out from him. As it exited him, though, something felt wrong, and he felt pain course throughout his entire body. He cried out as he fell to his hands and knees, and as this second wave of magic reached the symbols they warped. They moved faster and broke their orbits into random paths. The symbols themselves changed to be unrecognizable, occasionally merging or breaking.

Douxie heard cracking beneath him and wrenched his eyes away from Krel to his hands. Painful glowing pale blue cracks were forming on his fingers. In one of the larger shards of glass he saw those same cracks begin to crawl across his jaw and radiate outwards from his eyes.

Oh. He had used too much magic.

So, this is what dying felt like. Pain, and breaking promises he had never understood how someone could ever break.

He wasn't going to make it out of here alive.

All he could do now was make sure that Krel would.

Douxie grit his teeth as he pushed himself back to his knees. With a shout he stretched his hands out in front of him.

He intended a gout of pure flame to hit the soldier in the neck. Instead, a wave of force threw the soldier back several feet, sending them thudding into the wall next to the woman.

"Run," Douxie rasped to Krel. His voice was still unnaturally loud, but he couldn't bring himself to raise it above a whisper. Anything else would break him beyond recognition. He had to hold it together just long enough for Krel to escape. Then he could give in to the maelstrom of dark magic and whatever path it went down, and hopefully it would be a quick and painless death.

Krel turned and began to run but stopped in his tracks when he saw the woman.

She grabbed two things from her pockets. With one device, she began to tase Krel. Even as his head began to feel heavy, Douxie readied another blast of magic to stop her.

The cuffs on his wrists flared a bright and toxic green, and all Douxie knew then was darkness.

So, for the record, I'm pretty sure the show didn't make a distinction between the two but I'm making a distinction between shadow magic and dark magic. Shadow magic is based in darkness, illusion, and transportation through the Shadow Realm. Dark magic is magic that is powered by a life force, and is generally only used by those who are desperate (and feed their own life force to their magic) or cruel and power hungry (and feed other's lives to their magic). While the two shadowmancers in the show have used dark magic (Claire in desperation, Morgana in callousness towards life), it is possible to use shadowmancy without using dark magic, it's just a little more difficult than with non-shadow magic given the nature of the Shadow Realm. And, like shown here, it's possible to use entirely light-based magic like Douxie does and still use dark magic.