The torture began in earnest the next day. Sylvanni had initially believed the extent of her 'service' to House Kings would be gladiatorial entertainment in their arena and the harvesting of her Light, but Erxaris, it seemed, had crueler plans for her. The Fallen were so terribly curious about her kind and now they finally had a Guardian on hand to satiate that curiosity.
The room they took her to was simple, with walls of smooth concrete and a long since shattered window which had been replaced by an energy barrier. The only real feature was a simple iron ring in the floor to chain her down. There was no slack in her restraints, forcing her to hold an awkward kneeling position with her arms behind her. Then it began.
The objective was simple; they wanted to know what it took to kill her.
They started with their own weapons first. Shock daggers, then lances, then swords. She was cut, stabbed, and sliced in all variety of ways, until they found something lethal. Sometimes it was blessedly quick, such as the time a lance found her heart on the first thrust. Others were agonizingly slow, as her healing factor—weak though it was—continued to try to mend her, keeping her clinging to life through wounds which would kill a non-Guardian.
Her main tormentor was a burly Captain, but Erxaris watched over everything, with the canister trapping Sylvanni's Ghost in stasis clutched in her lower arms. Whenever Sylvanni died, her Ghost would be released to resurrect her, and then Sylvanni would give him up again. At first, they'd tried to communicate in those brief moments before she had to turn him over, but every time they did, it got a little harder to let go.
Eventually Sylvanni had to turn that side of herself off. She couldn't bear to acknowledge him at all, couldn't think of him as hers. The motions of letting Erxaris trap him once more became rote, empty, meaningless. At least, she told herself, he couldn't see or feel anything in the stasis. He didn't have to watch what they did to her, just fix her in the aftermath.
Erxaris and the Captain tried every method of wounding her with their Fallen melee weapons, even 'docking' her arms a few times, a punishment Sylvanni assumed was meant to be humiliating. After one such time, Erxaris held up a hand, curiously watching as Sylvanni's meager healing tried to seal over the amputation.
When the wounds healed new skin over a stump, the Judgment Vandal frowned. "Doesn't grow back? Such… pitiful things, your kind. Without Machine, is nothing."
They moved on to firearms: shock rifles with their lazily homing bolts, wire rifles with quick precision, a Captain's shrapnel launcher. They even brought in that accursed Servitor in and watched it blast her from close range. She was shot in the limbs, in the chest, in the head, from the front, back, and sides. Every way they could think of to destroy her, they did.
Then they tried more. They sealed the room and watched from the other side of their barrier as they pulled the air from the room and watched her try to suffocate. That one—agonizingly—didn't even work, her scraps of Light managing to keep her clinging to life even as her lungs burned for oxygen, but Erxaris and her hateful assistant watched Sylvanni gasp and writhe in the airless chamber for the better part of an hour before giving up on that one. At full Light strength, she'd routinely run missions in the vacuum of space with only mild discomfort, but down here with so little, it was cripplingly tortuous.
The Fallen picked up what alien technology they had on hand to try as well. They flushed the room with Hive Witch's poison, though how they'd managed to distill that, she couldn't fathom. They had a few Vex weapons on hand, a few severed Goblin and Hobgoblin arms grafted to external power sources to make them fire. Cabal slug rifles, no doubt scavenged from a firebase somewhere. The Fallen were nothing if not thieves and scavengers at heart.
The torments were endless but Sylvanni said very little through it all. At the start, it was pure determination which held her tongue. She was a Guardian with centuries of battle to her name; she was no stranger to pain and death. She could muster the will to force her way through this without giving her captors the satisfaction of seeing her break. Or so she had believed.
The relentlessness of the torture was something far beyond the violence of battle, however. When connected to her Ghost, her deaths were always quick, sparing her painful ends more often than not. The deaths she received at Erxaris' command were anything but. The agonies were ever-changing and endless, broken only by the dark, blank stretches of disconnected death. There was nothing she could do, there was no end in sight, no escape from the hell. Dying was only a temporary reprieve, for they always brought her back to suffer again.
Her stoic resolve could only endure so long, but rather than breaking down, begging for mercy, crying, pleading, Sylvanni found her mind drifting instead. It started with that mental break of her Ghost. She couldn't think of him as himself, couldn't acknowledge what he really was to her. What she handed back after each rez was only an object, a thing, meaningless to her. It had to be, because if it wasn't, she'd never be able to give him back, and then they both would die.
Then she began to disconnect from herself. Each time she resurrected, she felt a little further, her mind gently drifting further and further from the reality of her situation. It was reminiscent of being tethered during a spacewalk, drifting in the abyss of space, floating further and further from her anchor. What would happen if that tether was severed, when the tether was herself?
After all, could pain truly be considered pain when it was simply a constant state of being? There was no end to it, it was just the way things were now. Her nerves kept firing those signals, kept screaming at her to do something to stop this, but there was nothing to be done, and so her mind stopped listening. These things could happen to her body, but she consciously observed herself as though on the other side of thick glass, until it was almost as though she felt nothing at all.
Just as her Ghost was only a thing, an object, so too was she a thing herself.
Time was meaningless: there was no way to tell how long between her deaths and resurrections anyway and the monotony of pains simply blurred together. It wasn't as though there was anything which required her attention. They weren't torturing her for information, making demands, or asking questions of her. They didn't care about making her talk. They just wanted to see how she might be killed and enjoy the satisfaction of tearing her apart again and again.
At some point, Erxaris' torture assistant was replaced by a team of King Splicers. These, unlike those of the House of Devils, hadn't endowed themselves with SIVA augmentations, but they were interested in biological information. Her anatomy, alien to them, was a secret they wished to unravel, and they opened her up, a live dissection. They poked and prodded and rummaged about her body until they'd cut or stabbed something they shouldn't have, collapsed a lung or compromised an organ, and then they wrote that down and started again.
It didn't matter. None of it mattered. Sylvanni just drifted through it all, mind so very distant from the endless horror, barely making a sound. She was increasingly certain nothing would ever matter again. Time was meaningless, not even the barest circadian hint in this bleak, crumbling ruin, and she had no way to tell how long they left her dead each time before bringing her back. It might have been days; it might have been months. They never offered her food or water anymore, as they'd realized they didn't need to. Just pain, in endless, infinite, multitudinous, myriad forms.
If there was one relief, it was that the Servitor didn't come to drain her again. The constant wounds were such a drain on what meager Light she could get, there were no reserves for the Kings to siphon off.
After one resurrection, back in the smooth stone room, she was left alone, still chained to the floor. They brought her back from death, took her Ghost away, and simply abandoned her. As time passed, heartbeat after heartbeat, that drifty, floaty little piece of her at the edge of her distant mind could have laughed. Were they hoping to study the effects of isolation, glean some psychological insight? She simply sat, staring at nothing, absently noting as her body slipped physically closer to dehydration, until she was lying down, back to fluttering on the edge of life, burning through those sad little wisps of Light within her to stave off death. This one, she decided emotionlessly, was at least not as bad as the endless suffocation had been.
In that fragile limbo, she found herself thinking of Osiris of all people. It had been centuries now, she realized, since the last time she'd seen him, but she'd once been new to immortality, foolishly enamored with her Vanguard Commander and the dangerous ideas that would lead to his eventual exile.
Dangerous ideas that were… not entirely unlike this. He'd encouraged thanatonauts, who thought they could glean secret wisdom or insight from death. Warlocks who intentionally lingered on the edges of death, or flung themselves into its depths repeatedly. Perhaps one of them could have found this torture useful. After all, it was practically what those kinds did to themselves anyway.
She drifted in the haze of memories, of imaginings, of dreams and nonsense. Maybe visions like these were what thanatonauts sought, or maybe it was all just the hallucinations of a mind and body pushed far beyond their breaking points. If there was thanatonautic wisdom among it all, she couldn't summon the mental effort to try to remember any of it. She couldn't really believe any of it mattered.
Somewhere in that fugue state, something must have killed her again, because at some point, she was brought back to life yet again, no longer alone. Erxaris stood in the chamber, lower arms crossed over her Judgement-green tabard, upper arms holding the stasis capsule. Her only weapon was a shock dagger at her waist, but the power Erxaris held within House Kings wasn't truly martial anyway.
By rote, Sylvanni held out her Ghost, offering him back once again. Had Sylvanni been herself, she might have noticed how he still turned to look back at her, every time he was taken, she might have recognized the mix of pity and fear in the tilt of his corners before the capsule froze him again.
But she didn't register any of that. She couldn't. She was adrift, and the Ghost was just a shape, just a thing to hand back as part of the routine.
Erxaris clicked the container shut with a small click, then handed it back to someone waiting outside the chamber for safekeeping. When she turned back, she tipped her head as she regarded the blank-faced Warlock standing before her. "Wish tests to stop?"
Sylvanni didn't answer. A part of her couldn't really believe that there would be an end to the pain they put her through. She just stared straight forward, unmoving, waiting until the suffering started again.
Erxaris chittered a laugh. "Stoic, it becomes. Answer, Machine thief. Opportunity not to be offered twice."
"What." Sylvanni forced the word out, her own voice a foreign rasp to her ears. "Do you. Want."
"Fealty."
The word was so surprising, so out of place, it shocked some part of her back to enough awareness to look up, meeting the Vandal's four eyes with her two.
"Renounce Machine-right. Your Tra-vel-er." The drawn-out emphasis of each syllable couldn't be anything other than mocking. "Swear to House Kings. Loyal donor of ether."
In the distant drifting, a piece of Sylvanni could hardly see the point in answering, couldn't muster the will to care about what happened to her. A smaller, desperate, animal part of her, the shreds of her self-preservation, begged for a respite, willing to give Erxaris anything she demanded if it would mean an end to the suffering.
Neither of these were capable of a real decision, neither were capable of true survival. The Void, as ever, held her salvation. What Light she held was faint, but within it she found that calm stillness, the centering of self she needed. A singularity around which to gather herself once again for just a moment, long enough to think.
House Kings wished to make their Guardian prisoner a Guardian slave instead? There could be opportunity in that, she realized. So be it. If she was going to find a chance to escape and retrieve her Ghost in truth, it wouldn't be done in these passing, powerless moments of life between endless, captive deaths. She didn't expect they'd be sloppy in this, but it only took one moment of lapse for this to work.
As for the oath, the renunciation? Meaningless. She didn't think Erxaris was foolish to believe endless, repeatedly lethal torture had inspired anything resembling loyalty within her for her captors, but that wasn't what this was really about. They both knew that. It was about the power of forcing a Guardian through the shame of saying such a thing. But what did Sylvanni care about shame, after what she'd been through? Whatever dignity she'd thought she had was long gone in the eyes of these Fallen, and she wouldn't have let something as worthless as pride keep her from seizing a possible advantage, anyway.
She was, for just a moment, cold clarity once again, the void's resonant reassurance within her. The decision made. Sylvanni let out a long breath, then forced the words out. "I… accept."
Erxaris drew herself up, a sense of triumph clear even in her alien posture. "Renounce."
Sylvanni fixed her eyes on the floor and swore the lie. "I renounce the Traveler, and my right to its gifts." Even saying it felt like poison, but she'd endured far worse toxins recently.
"Swear," Erxaris said, punctuated with anticipatory clicking. "Swear loyalty to House Kings, its great and regal Kell. Swear your stolen ether to the service of your House."
"I swear… loyalty to House Kings and its Kell. I swear my Light to its service."
The rebreather hissed as Erxaris drew in a full draught of ether, her lower hands clasping together. "You will be lowest of House, beneath dregs, beneath shanks. Silveks, Kings Slave."
The butchered eliksnization of her name felt like a final insult, but Sylvanni gave no reaction, no response. From this point forward, she followed orders, nothing more. This void-drift she'd cultivated could serve her in this as well, she thought. These Fallen would surely seek further ways to humiliate her, new ways to hurt her, but now she would feel nothing of it, give them no satisfaction of a reaction from her.
The shock dagger clanged to the ground between the bowed Awoken and the looming Vandal, sliding into Sylvanni's still-lowered gaze. Sylvanni didn't reach for it, though she had a sinking feeling she knew what was coming next.
"Prove loyalty," Erxaris hissed cruelly. "Your Kell demands more than Machine-ether. Demands blood. Demands life, Silveks. Then, oath accepted."
Sylvanni slowly reached forward, picking up the small dagger. For the barest moment, she considered turning on Erxaris, but as satisfying as the idea might have been, the other Fallen outside this room would surely turn out in force to put her down permanently. In the end, there really wasn't much of a choice. At least when she was the one holding the knife she was able to make it quick.
After all, what was one more death after everything?