[center][img]http://i.imgur.com/jSsqQBI.png[/img]
[img]http://i.imgur.com/3qC1FKa.png[/img]

[img]http://i.imgur.com/KIbsIS0.jpg?1[/img]

[img]http://i.imgur.com/sbWHRet.png?1[/img][/center]

	Pain. Sometimes, when the guards forgot to relight the lamps outside her cell, it and the cold darkness were the only friends that paid her a visit. There were times when it was like an all-consuming fire toying with her body, and others it was an ember, lurking eternally beneath her skin, waiting for the right hand to feed it. Tonight—or today, for all she knew in the everlasting midnight of the dungeons—it was somewhere in between. It prickled at her left leg and arm, and crawled up toward her neckline. It feasted savagely on the right side of her body from the center of her stomach to her spine, working its way down the side of her leg. It blazed the worst from just above her hip downward courtesy of the newest additions the Sages had recently added to their experiment.
	Thea lay in the darkness, her gaze staring unseeingly toward the ceiling she had long since memorized every crack of. The lamps outside had flickered out an eternity ago, though, she supposed, it could have only been a few minutes. Time was cruel like that. Minutes passed by in years when you wished something would end, yet years flew in minutes when all you wanted was for life to slow down. Here, it was only worse, as if even it was on the Sages’ side. In a place without even the thinnest sliver of daylight to judge it by, it slunk through the halls and cells, passing with malicious, excruciating slothfulness.
	She inhaled slowly, each breath exciting the burning pain in her side, and tried to focus on something else. With her jumbled memories useless, leaving her with not even her own name to dwell on, she shut her eyes, clenched her teeth, and listened.
	It was always chilly in the dungeons, but she had grown used to that. Even the dank smell of the stale air filled with the stench of death and decay had lost its pungency to her. Water dripped somewhere in the distance, echoing loudly as it drummed out an uneven rhythm. The gentle scurrying of rodents passed through the hall and occasionally within her cell, looking for food. A rat sniffled beneath her hard cot, and she wondered if it was Terrain, the rat she had been sharing her meals with for a while now. She always knew it was him, with his missing ear and scarred body. The creature had begun to trust her, perhaps because it sensed a kindred spirit, becoming, she supposed, her only tangible friend in this place of suffering and death.
	She took a startled breath, wincing and hissing through her teeth as it irked her body, when the all too familiar sound of screams sliced through the silence. Screams of pure agony. Screams she knew the meaning of all too well. The distance between her cell and the lab did little do muffle them. They belonged to a man, likely the one who had been shouting profanities at the guards nonstop earlier that day. She must have been unconscious when they took him away, but it would explain the quiet that had settled in his cell.
	The Sages were at it again, trying to replicate the success they had had with her.
	A nauseating pit formed in her stomach. Not because of the man’s screams, but because she was [i]glad.[/i] Glad that, for the time being, it was [i]not her,[/i] and hoping it would work so they would have someone else to torture for a while in her place. Her hands clenched, sending a spike of pain shooting up her left arm, but she ignored it. Deep down, she knew that thought was wrong, that at one point in time, it would never have crossed her mind. But the more she tried to remember who she was, who it was that would have cringed at such a thought, the harder her head began to throb. 
	Inevitably, the screams cut off as suddenly as they had begun. A sickening silence filled the halls once more, broken only by the confused dripping from a source Thea was content with not knowing.
	The Sages’ experiment had failed.
	Thea swallowed hard and took a shaky breath at the silence of her hopes being dashed. The Sages were always that much more brutal with her after a failure. Still, a small voice swirled in the back of her mind, filled with sorrow for the man and the family he had been stolen from. Though her first few weeks there were one large, jumbled blur to her, she could never forget how the Sages tested her "compatibility" with their plans, no matter how hard she tried. Though she wished the man had made it for selfish reasons, it was not a death she would will on anyone.
	[i]Soon,[/i] she promised herself. [i]I’ll do it soon.[/i]
	For the last… well, she could not say, but however long it had been, she had begun to downplay her strength as much as she could. She would need the element of surprise if she was ever to have even a faint chance at escaping.
	Her eyes snapped open and her heart quickened as it always did at the sound of heavy footsteps coming down the hall. Thea knew the guard’s patterns by heart; it was too early for their usual patrol, and they had stopped dragging the corpses past her doorway somewhere around a couple months after her arrival. Or perhaps it had been years.
	Doubting they would take the time to go out of their way to relight the lamps, she held her breath, staring into the darkness as the flicker of firelight filtered in through the barred window in the heavyset door of her cell. It was about time, she supposed, for a “training session” with the Mage. They followed the Sages’ work on her almost as predictably as the guards’ patrols.
	She squinted when someone held a lamp up beside the window, the light cascading over the half of her in its path. It glinted off what looked like a thin gauntlet elegantly conformed to her left arm, looking as if she had simply slipped on a metal glove with plates of a gold color and various shades of bronze. The gauntlet covered her fingers and rose to the base of her neck where its thin metal visibly merge with her skin, nothing visible keeping it in place. An opalescent sheen coating the apparent metal shone as the firelight flickered, hitting it just right, the color also creating a haze over her gold-flecked eyes as she turned her head slowly to look to the door.
	“You still alive in there?” the guard wheezed mockingly though the bars in his familiar, irritatingly squeaky voice, his head nothing but a dark shadow on the other side of the door.
	“You still a Mage reject out there, Gaillard?” she bit through her teeth, her own voice hardened in pain and horse from its rare use—in conversation, at least.
	Gaillard snarled. Whether from her comment, that she had picked up his name, or both, she could not say, but he lowered his lantern and jerked his head up in a nod to someone beside him.
	The dark outline of another guard appeared. One with magic, she deducted, as the sound of locks sliding back echoed through the door.
	Thea tensed, trying to mentally prepare herself to move as Gaillard used his own special key to finish unlocking the door. The Sages took no shortcuts in making sure she stayed put. They often even moved her between cellblocks, which was one thing she had yet to find a pattern in. That, and when they remembered she needed food. As far as she could tell, they moved her at random through the massive place, but they had unwittingly let her become familiar with both some of the layout of her prison, and the guard’s routines in more than one area. 
	Slowly, she moved her right arm behind her, the skin around her wrist still red and raw from pulling against the binds that had held her in the Sages’ lab. Her body always felt that much heavier when she tried to move after being still for so long.
	Gaillard pushed the door open. “Up with you, you little brat.” He spat on the ground at his feet as he stood in the doorway, glowering down at her. The fresh stubble of a beard had begun to sprout from his pointed chin, and a tribal patterned tattoo circled his neck.  
	Knowing it would be futile to try resisting, she clenched her teeth and suppressed a moan as she managed to put weight on her right arm and lift herself up, the embers ever waiting inside her waking up. The flames already gnawing on her side decided to chew with more vigor, making her give something between a loud groan and hissing shout.
	She could practically feel Gaillard’s smirk as she struggled simply to sit up.
	“So, what?” she asked almost breathlessly as she tried to let her body adjust to being used, wanting to wipe that expression from his face. “They don’t have anything more fitting for a reject to do than crawl around a dungeon like the pathetic worm he is?”
	On the bright side, it worked; his smirk turned into an angered snarl. On the bad side, he thrust the lamp into the other guard’s chest, who fumbled with it before catching it, stormed over to Thea, gripped her, hard, between neck and left shoulder, and yanked her to her feet.
	She staggered up and screamed through her teeth as the fire turned to a knife stabbing at her right side and legs. Her legs gave out at the sudden use, but what Gaillard lacked in magic, he made up for in strength. He kept her upright, his vice-like grip on her only adding an extra discomfort.
	The other guard, his face hidden behind a silvery helmet branded with the insignia she saw everywhere here of a savage-looking, two-headed eagle, gripped her right arm, his bulky gauntlet rough and cold against her skin. For a moment, she hung limply between them, breathing hard through clenched teeth from a mix of anger, hatred, and pain.
	The nightdress she wore with its thin straps in place of sleeves hung loosely from her pale, sun-deprived body. Dirt, dust, and blood, both dried and some still damp around her right side, stained the once white fabric. Her long hair hung around her face, dark circles beneath her eyes and her cheeks a bit sunken, the tangled mess of the red strands only enhancing her pitiful, emaciated appearance.
	Finally, her muscles seemed to remember how to work, and she slowly supported her own weight. The chill of the stone floor beneath her bare feet made her shiver slightly.
	The guards hauled her out of the cell, and she let them support some of her weight between them. The intense ache infesting even her bones always eased a bit once she got moving, at least enough to be on the verge of bearable, but she was not about to show her captors that. Not yet, at least. For now, she stumbled along between them, playing the helpless little princess in need of rescuing.
	The thought struck a chord somewhere inside her, but it disappeared as quickly as it had come, leaving her to wonder what kinds of pathetic books she must have once read about kidnapped princesses being rescued by their knight in shining armor.
	“I quite like this job,” Gaillard began, the squeak in his voice lessening its desired, threatening effect. His dark blue eyes made up for the lack of menace in his voice, glittering maliciously.
	He leaned in a bit closer to her, readjusting his grip. Thea could smell a hint of ale on his breath, but it was not enough to mask its usual stench, as if he was rotting from the inside out. “My favorite part is getting to hear your screams and pleas for them to stop. This place wouldn’t be the same without them. But since you’re feeling so talkative, I’d [i]love[/i] to know what it is they do in there.”
	To Gaillard’s amusement, her hands clenched and she looked away, in part to avoid breathing in his breath, but mostly to keep him from seeing the fear she knew shone in her eyes.
	She swallowed, trying to not think about the answer to his request. “Sure.” Her voice trembled slightly. “But only once you figure out what a toothbrush is and stop eating skunk butts for lunch.”
	A snigger burst from the guard on her right, but Gaillard snarled and forced them to a halt. She looked over as she felt him turn, and tried to pull away when he reached to draw a dagger hanging at his right hip.
	“Gaillard!” the second guard growled. His voice was deep and imposing, filled with life and authority.
	What unnerved Thea about it was that it was an [i]unfamiliar[/i] voice. She had heard at least every guard speak on their rounds. She knew which ones came when. She had timed them. She knew exactly how many steps it took for each of them to walk the hall leading to her cell. She had listened to their hushed conversations, making note of every voice, every tone that echoed through the dungeons. After all, there was little else for her to use to attempt keeping her sanity. But she had never heard [i]his[/i] voice before, and the Sages did not strike her as the kind of people to bring in new guards unless it was absolutely necessary.
	“We have our orders!” the guard barked. “Harm her, and I’ll skin you myself. [i]Then[/i] we’ll see whose screams these walls hear tonight.”
	Despite herself, she smirked. If he wasn’t one of the Sages’ men, she would have said she almost liked this guard.
	Gaillard glared at his companion so hard she was surprised the other guard’s head did not explode. Reluctantly, he released his tight grip on the dagger, his eyes burning with fury. With a snort, he jerked her forward, making her stumble with a shout, and their procession continued.
	Just before they reached where the cellblock branched off into three other corridors, lit lamps began to line the halls, hanging from ironwork sconces. To the left were more cells. She started to angle herself toward the right as they neared, already visualizing the number of doors between her and the room the Sages enjoyed testing her abilities in.
	“Wrong way, wretch.” Gaillard grinned down at her with dark glee, then pulled her to continue straight down the hall.
	Her attention snapped to the hall ahead, terror quickening her heart and making her forget how to breathe. Her steps ceased and she shook her head with a quivering exhale.
	“Don’t want to keep the Sages waiting,” Gaillard purred. “They’re already in a rather foul mood as it is. Wouldn’t want to make it worse, now, would you?”
	The guards pulled her forward, not to the training room, but toward the lab and the Sages where they waited hungrily for their next victim, haunting her, torturing her even in the rare bit of true sleep she managed to get.