Tremors of Change

Avii hung his head forward limply, his vision focused on the sanguine pool that slicked the floor beneath his raised body. He was the lone sacrifice in the chamber that day, and with his eyes not needing to focus on anything particular, he instead passed the time by counting the droplets of blood as they dripped from him.

Nine hundred eighty-three. He counted, keeping his mind off the feeling of his flesh being flayed from his back. Nine hundred eighty-four. Nine hundred eighty-five…

“Avii, survive.” Harbinger would interrupt his counting every few minutes, its voice, once a means to stave off insanity, now a nuisance. “Avii, you must—"

But he ignored the hypocritical entity, continuing to count away.

With a tug against his shoulder, Avii winced the moment he felt another strip of flesh freed from his body. Soon, one of the guards seeing to his torture that day stepped before him, showing off the slab of future man-leather that would be used to bind souls to chairs. Only, Avii didn’t give them the satisfaction of his torment. He merely continued to stare forward, quietly counting as the droplets reached a thousand.

“Look at that.” The guard growled excitedly, hoisting up Avii’s head by his short hair to view the flesh. “Fresh mule!”

Though Avii didn’t respond. Even if he had still possessed his tongue, there would be nothing for him to say. Words only gave the Koviks satisfaction. His silence was more powerful than any insult he could sling, and it became apparent as the man before him began to lose his temper.

“Say something!” He yelled, striking Avii’s face with his gauntlet. “You’re half blind! Not half deaf!”

“Maybe we should even it out for it.” The voice of another guard spoke, his feet stepping into view as Avii felt a hand take his ear.

There was a sudden pain as a blade shaved the side of his head away. In that instant, the sound that came in through the opposite ear from his missing eye suddenly became muffled. And though Avii wanted to scream, he merely looked down, forced to begin counting anew as he had lost his place.

One. Two. Three.

“Ear of mule!” The guard chuckled, throwing the hunk of flesh to the pool before Avii. “Got anything to say about that?”

But as the silence set in and the frustrated grunts of the men around him grew louder, Avii knew he was winning the encounter. After all, surviving thirty years of torture and abuse made the last three months with unimaginative halfwits easy to withstand. Even as they let loose the bindings that held him aloft, dropping him to the floor, he could tell just how spiked their anger was. With each kick he received from the trio of metal-footed fiends, he could tell they weren’t even guiding their blows. They struck with disregard of his internal organs. They missed the festering wound that stung when he breathed. There wasn’t even an attempt to bash in his remaining teeth or ‘accidentally’ tear the soft flesh from his one good eye.

“Eno-enough!” Finally, one of them ordered, commanding the remaining two to back off. “It’s well enough tenderized. Let’s take it back to the cell and shackle it down for the night.”

“Avii, danger,” Harbinger warned as the men lifted him to his feet. “Survive…”

But Avii again ignored the entity, instead allowing his weak body to be dragged from the private chamber into the torturous commons he shared with his companions. As the guards hauled his limp form into the cell he called home, he could hear the grinder once more active beyond the walls of the prison. In the three months since his capture, every time he heard the distant machine groaning, he knew death had come once more to collect. And even though Harbinger continued to scream in the back of his mind that he must survive, every day he fantasized only of a sweet release.

“Here’s good enough.” The commanding guard grumbled, tossing Avii face-first into the liquid waste that had filled the bottom of his cell. “You, flip it on its back. You, shackle it.”

Hands took hold of Avii, tossing his frail body around as they prepared him for something. It was easy for them to move him, even though they were nothing but weak-looking grunts themselves. In the time he had spent incarcerated, he had lost all the weight regained from the food provided by the Ostave’s troupe. In fact, Kovika prison meals were fewer and farther between than they were in Estarian prisons. This meant that what mass he had acquired over the last twenty years had also slowly begun to disappear once more.

Fortunately for Avii, he was used to going without. But the same could not be said for the others who had joined him. To them, this was a particular kind of suffering that their privileged lives could have never prepared them for.

The last Avii had seen Ostave almost a month prior, the orc was already down half his weight. Aindes had become nothing more than a pole, wasting away into a twig of an elf. As for Vivat, Avii tried to keep himself from looking her way. He still wanted to protect her from Sebastian’s devious intentions, but there was little he could do now that they were never in the same chamber together. All he knew was that day and night, her crying seemed to be endless.

But he couldn’t worry about her. About any of them. For at that moment, he only had the will to worry for himself. A challenge to say the least, as the filth of his holding cell burned the freshly flayed wounds that covered him, making him long for death. He craved a swift and painless release that would take him from the hell he lived. And the longer he wished for it, the more he felt it in his core. The feeling of that silent prayer taking hold, like a seed blossoming to one day provide the fruit he so hungered for. Yet, as much as it was a wonderful fantasy to believe that his end drew near, he knew it wasn’t to be so.

As the shackle snapped into place around Avii’s ankle and the sharp blades bit at his skin, the other guard flipped him to his back. From there, he briefly caught a glimpse through swollen eye at the disgusted glances of the Kovik soldiers watching over him. That was when he noticed one of them popping the cork on a healing potion, the first of his stay, and his heart dropped. He knew that the salvation that dangled above him would only prolong his torture. So Avii instinctively turned his head away.

“Oh, no you don’t!” The closest guard ordered as he crouched down. “Open up!”

Struggling, Avii shifted his head around, using what energy he had to keep his mouth closed. If the potion entered his body, he would be healed. His ear and eye would regrow. His flesh would mend. His body would be revitalized. And he didn’t want that. He yearned for death. For freedom.

“I said open up, dirty mule!”

With a strike to Avii’s face, the man shattered the mule’s nose, adding more blood to the cesspool of a cell. But still, he refused to open his mouth, opting to drown himself in piss and shit before giving the torturers what they wanted.

After several seconds and making no progress, the frustrated guard that had taken Avii’s ear reached down, twisting his head upright in the moments before another revealed a tattered rag. With a delighted huff, the man pulled it tight over the mule’s face, finally blinding him as he struggled weakly against the cloth. Moving his hands in a desperate flail, Avii found them quickly bound to his side by the first guard as liquid began to pour over the rag. Healing potion flowed between the cloth, and though he did the best he could to hold his breath, the magical elixir flowed down his broken nose. Avii coughed and choked as the sensation of drowning filled his chest with panic. He fought against the bindings, bucking and flailing, gagging as the healing potion filled his lungs and gut equally.

“Hey,” One of the guards spoke as the liquid began to slow. “Give it a second one. The Butcher said to make sure it was well healed up for the end of the week. Big plans, after all.”

This was the first Avii had heard of these plans for him and his torture, but he believed it. After all, with every day that came and went over the past week, each of his travel companions had disappeared and come back especially broken. While none of them talked about their time, Avii could only imagine what horrors awaited him.

“Right.” The figure that still hovered above him spoke, uncorking another potion. “Drink up, old mule—”

That was when the rumbling from outside grew louder, and the machine that turned bodies into potion began to screech and groan. The world vibrated as a familiar quake trembled Avii to his core. It was not like an explosion, tearing apart the earth. Nor was it the roll of thunder from above. What Avii felt in that moment reminded him of something from his past. From his time in Maldain. Deep in the mountain.

“What’s that, now?” The guard overhead asked. “Some sort of issue with the roller?”

They had no way of knowing what Avii did. That the sound they heard and the tremble they felt was merely the pre-shaking before a terrible mountain quake. Powerful and rolling, it would soon be upon them, and before they could prepare themselves, it arrived. The earth began to tremble. Began to roll and shift. In seconds, they were knocked from their feet to the filth of Avii’s cell and, a moment later, to the level beneath them.

In an instant, the building began to crumble around the prisoner, as the earth shook violently. Walls fell, taking with them ceilings and floors. Before he knew it, Avii was falling, watching as his chain grew taut around his ankle. Then, reaching its maximum range, the iris closed and, with a sickening crunch, severed his foot from the leg.