Asylum

I am here. The Imperial Asylum. The largest and oldest asylum on the Continent, it's older even than the Empire itself, though it runs it now, as it does everything in the Empire. 

There are asylums like it all over the Empire now. There has always been a need for madhouses, because there has always been madness, because there has always been magic and there has always been runoff. The magic is everywhere but it's not for everyone. 

Outward magic is difficult to grasp, conjuring and circling and even tricks of the light can be hard to do without a natural affinity, and can cause a lot of damage to the poor wielder, as well as anyone caught around them. 

 Inward magic could be even more dangerous, in large part because it was easier to grasp but still difficult to actually master. 

But the payoff, as it were, was immediate. The brain opened up for the magic, letting the user settle in to their own fantasies. The state could even be achieved through the runoff, and people with nothing better to do often did that. There were so many of them everywhere. When they got in the way, they'd be thrown in the asylums. And so the asylums filled up.

There are many different kinds of madnesses, the ones who talk to themselves, of course, or scream, the ones trapped in delusions running through their mind they can't control, the ones who hurt themselves, though the guardsmen would usually prefer they finish themselves on the street than have to be taken in, the ones overwhelmed by visions, the ones who hide in the shadows to melt into them, the ones who don't know who they are, and the ones that do. And the ones who were all of those things. 

If I could explain my madness, I wouldn't be mad. I'm not mad. The world is cursed. 

The kings and queens and princes and princesses of our continent fought constantly, looking for any advantage the magic could give them. 

The Empire changed that. We fought and we murdered and we plundered and we opened up the veins of magic but we stopped the wars. The only wars from then were ours, the Empire's, and the Emperor was right and just. So it went. 

When I first left the Imperial Army I crossed the Easy Sea to the Southern Continent, where they practiced ash magic. 

I saw there for the first time magic outside the Empire, and that it too drove people mad. I don't want to remember it.

In the Imperial Asylum I don't have to. 

This is the first place that's felt like home since the home of my childhood that is often just a vague memory. It's hard to hold on to things. 

The treatment for madness at the Imperial Asylum is torture, gratuitous, justified, for those blood on their hands not their own, liberating, for those trapped by their own consumption, blinding white, always painful. 

Pain is everywhere. In a way physical pain is a blessing. It can be a blessing. It gives the mind something to do to avoid the psychological pain, to put it away somewhere in the brain the mind can't reach. 

There are so many things I can't remember while other memories come as flashes to sear the pain. 

I've welcomed the torture at the Asylum, gratuitous and justified and liberating. But not blinding white. I am very much here. 

There are restraints to prevent the body from going limp during the exercise of torture and smelling salts and magical means to prevent the mind from doing so. 

Major and minor mages came and went, but only observed the torture, and fed on it. The torturers themselves were laymen, sometimes controlled by the magic, sometimes by their own sadism, and sometimes even by their own guilt. 

The mages took an interest the first time my magic expressed during one of the torture exercises. 

I don't want to remember the details but it involved pulling me in different directions. 

In the pain of each limb I could feel a different memory of brutality I had inflicted. My mind was being torn apart too. 

The minor mage who was observing could feel this, and approached me to run his fingers across my trembling chest. There my mind tore apart too. The flash of a memory of being torn away from home, torn away from childhood. The minor mage observing the torture, feeding on it, could feel the fingers of that minor mage like they were his own. 

He grabbed my face to look at me but I was not there. He knew I was in him. 

-Harder! the minor mage yelled at the torturers who were pulling the levers that controlled the devices that pulled on my limbs. 

I welcomed that too. I could feel the fear of the minor mage and the way it was like the fear that I fed on when I pillaged and murdered on the battlefields and in the villages and it kept my mind together as my body told it it was being torn apart in a pain I had brought upon myself for what I had done.

And the memories of it taunted me from the shadows of my brain. 

I started to laugh through my screams. There was so much more to go. Here was torture but life had always been torture. Life is torture. 

The Empire brought order. We murdered and pillaged and we brought order. But the dead were given the most mercy, because their torture was over. 

The minor mage started to laugh along with me but the psychic projection was too much for the torturers. 

The sudden absence of pain can be as tortuous to the body as its application, even when the body is forced prone so that it can't develop a tolerance by going limp and letting go. 

-What happened? the minor mage asked angrily as he turned around to look at the torturers. 

Though my vision was blurry I could tell they'd been flayed by my mind's memories lashing out.

He must not have seen anything like it before, because the minor mage scurried up to one of the torturers who had lurched over in pain and received a fist to the chest that sent him across the room. 

-Guards! the minor mage yelled out to the door of the torture room. 

The torturer hadn't known what he'd done. The others tried to return to their levers. I was returning. 

The minor mage sat huddled by the door, which locked from the outside, waiting for the guard. 

It would not be long before he would tell a major mage what had happened. 

Finally the lock on the door clicked and swung open, the guard nearly tripping on the minor mage by the door. 

-That one hit me! the mage yelled as he pointed accusingly at the torturer that sent him flying across the room, who had also returned to the levers. 

But the guard looked at me. He could feel the aftermath of what had happened to the men and turned back to the minor mage. 

-What happened? the guard asked. 

-I told you! the minor mage yelled out as he grabbed on to the guard to get up. That one hit me! he yelled. He sent me flying across the room!

The guard looked at the minor mage skeptically and pitifully. 

-Did you do something? the guard asked quietly as he looked the minor mage over. 

-Yes! I called for you!

I had started to laugh with my screams again. The guard looked to me again, then at the torturers, who were working now stronger than before, feeding off the same force I'd honed on the battlefield to strengthen those around me. 

I tried to pull it back into myself.

I remembered the first time I'd been showed this method at the training camp the Imperial Army had sent me to, which was in the mountains. I remembered them and having seen them before. 

It doesn't come out willingly at first. The mind clenches reflexively to hold on, even when it doesn't know what to do with it or even what to make of it. 

I remembered it finally spilling out and the trainees around me feeding off it to tear apart the bags of rags fashioned into shapes of human bodies set before them. But it was not the same as the real thing. I didn't feel the rags tearing apart the way I would flesh on the battlefields and in the villages. 

They trained me how to unclench, to channel my force and unleash it to those around me, then to clench up my mind again to hold everything there while the men, my men, worked. 

They taught me how to project my force and they taught the others how to latch on to it. They did not teach me how to withhold it, or how to pull it away from a warrior feeding on it. 

But I remembered it happening once. It had been the first time they tore into flesh with my power. I had not expected to feel so viscerally at the other end of it. I felt the men tearing into our enemies and I felt our enemies too, all their pain wrapped up into the moment that we were intertwined. 

My mind felt like it was not my own and it retreated. The men lost my power.

I remember there was a minor mage observing there too. I remember that now. I remember the memory being burned out of me. 

It did not happen again, and eventually the minor mage stopped observing and our training expeditions went out further from the camp. Soon I was ready to march to and fro across the continent. I had not had a dedicated party, and would be sent out each time to battle with different men. This I learned was so that they would not unwittingly bond with me psychically. 

It was important that I knew how to take directions. I didn't know how to do much else. I knew how to take blows without getting knocked out, keeping my men, whoever they happened to be, focused on murder and pillage more intently. 

I could not remember how to pull my force back from my torturers. But I would not want to do it even if I could. This I tell myself. I welcome the pain. There has always been pain. 

Physical pain can be a relief. I cannot be pulled apart if I am not anywhere. I am here. 

Eventually the minor mage did tell the major mage what had happened and I was assigned a dedicated band of torturers, who the major mages had decided had the best attributes amenable to feeding off my force while remaining under their control.  

They were the real sadists. I welcomed it. They fed off my force and relished in it in a way I'd rarely felt on the battlefield. I never had the time to get to know the contours of their minds or to let them crack into mine. 

The torturers had no formal hierarchy. Their order and role was determined by the particular exercise or regiment of exercises of torture being performed. I remember all of them but they are not for you. Physical torture is dull even when it can't dull. 

But there was one tortured in the band assigned to me, in my head I called him Scar for the simplistic reason that he had one running across his face. When our minds would crack together I tried to probe its recesses for how it happened. 

I saw instead visions of him as a child, a vein running across his face where the scar would be. I was not sure if it was really there or if it was a mark for where the cut would have to be. 

Some of us have every scar we'll ever bear already marked on us. They are guaranteed. Sometimes I can see them.

The psychological torture at the Asylum was more subtle but it was everywhere. It came from the building itself, from the pile of ancient stones that made it up and from the pain they had absorbed over the generations.

The Asylum, I knew, must have been built over a vein of magic, and the stones had become collectors, the entire Asylum an echo chamber for the worst coming out of everyone.

The Custodians of the Asylum understood this. We were kept for most of the day and night, and there was not a difference between the two, isolated, from each other, from ourselves, from day and night and the world around us. 

The cells were small and the stones of the wall were the thickest available. 

The torture chambers were not in a different part of the Asylum than where we were stored. Instead our cells surrounded the torture chambers. The chambers were like organisms, floating in the interstitial ether of our fear and misery, compartmentalized to be broken down and reconstituted in ever more lurid potency. 

When I first arrived time passed formlessly. There were no windows anywhere in the Asylum, though sometimes the locals could hear the screams from the outside. I thought it was my mind, unwilling to latch on to the rhythm of the passage of time but even when I tried, it was the place. 

We were fed what I thought was once a day, but it was not so often and it was done irregularly. 

But we saw each other only when we were fed so we counted the days in that way anyway.

The manner in which we would be told was irregular too. Sometimes a bell would ring, sometimes a horn would go off, sometimes a guard would come yelling through the cells. 

Everyone knew how to get there, it was the only large room where torture didn't take place, and new arrivals followed along with everyone else. 

I don't remember how I learned where the gathering room was. I just knew how to get there because there was no place else to go. 

Some regular things were known from those who had been here longer. Every twenty or so feedings we would be permitted to stay in the room after the food was done so that we could move around, those who were able. 

It was not so easy to socialize here. Affliction is a contagion and the worst of us was what all of us were. 

On one of the days of movement, I met a woman who said she knew me. 

-I saw you, she said to me as I paced in circles around one of the rocks that had been my table to eat. Plundering and murdering. 

I didn't know she was taking to me at first and kept walking around the rock, and my mind was still in the cell, constricted, even as my legs were finally able to move. In the cell I'd crammed myself into a corner to better get away from everything.

-You, you, you! she started to yell, getting closer to me. She was much smaller than me but she grabbed on to my shoulders to try to pull me down. 

I didn't want to hurt her.

-Look, I said. What did I do? Tell me.

-You tore a hole through my life, she muttered. She was disappointed I had answered.

I wanted to give her from my life to fill that hole but everything I had was already withered away. And it was always like the vapor.

I hung my arms and head down to supplicate myself but I still towered over her. I dropped to my knees and she smacked me on the head then spit on me.

-We're all here because of you, she said viciously, and turned her back to me.

I stayed there on my knees for the rest of the period of movement.

During some of these periods, the Custodians allowed outsiders into the Asylum. Some merchants thought there were things inside these walls to trade for. A few inmates had family members who visited, though this was always dangerous. Several cells had whole families in them, but they always started with just the one person first. The others came as visitors before finding themselves unable to get out.

Even with permission--and part of the torture was sometimes telling us we could go whenever we wanted--it was difficult to find the way out of the labyrinth of the Imperial Asylum and into the outside. 

Many of the guards stayed at the Asylum for several seasons, visiting family occasionally. Family, of course, never visited the guards. Some of the inmates said they used to be guards.

The Custodians did not live in the Asylum, and rarely visited, sending their functionaries when necessary instead. They ruled the Asylum from afar.

Slavers came with the outsiders too, and would sometimes negotiate with the guards.

Reluctantly, the Custodians also allowed some missions of charity. These were the worst. They did not know they were being drawn here, and in the inmates they saw themselves. They were there to rescue only themselves. A few of them ended up inmates, too.

I avoided these missionaries at all costs. Some of the cults sent young, nubile women to entice the inmates into their rituals. These were slavers by another name. 

Judges of the peace would sometimes send members of the nobility who'd committed some petty crime or another that could not be ignored, but could not be treated to the same kind of brutal punishment as the common folk. So they were sent here.

Before I recognized Avila as the preaching priest I took him for one of these miscreants when I first noticed him eyeing me on one of the occasions outsiders were allowed in. I did not want to have to do with anybody. I stayed away from him, looking to get behind groups of inmates or rocks.

Eventually I told a guard I had torture to be. I don't know what he heard but he grabbed me by the collar and threw me in the direction of the hall to my cell, where I scurried.

He followed me, and called out when I got to the cell. When I heard his voice, I knew who it was and then I remembered his face, but I don't know if I had seen him in the square when I first heard him preaching or if the voice echoing down the hall that I knew so clearly placed itself with his face in the confines of my mind.

I turned around to the entrance to my cell and pushed myself back into the wall.

I remembered the story that he had told that was about a foreign soldier and not me, and I remembered confusion after and then the Asylum. Home.

-Brother Joao, he said as he appeared in my cell.

-I don't have any brothers, I responded, not looking at him. I am always alone.

He kicked me. I didn't expect it, and scooted away from him before he could do it again.

-No one's alone, Avila said. Doesn't everyone hurt like you? he asked as he reached his hand down to pull me up.

-I like it down here, I said.

He took a look around the small cell and sat in a corner to face me. He looked at me deeply and I felt the need to cover my scars even though I didn't really know they were there. They had always been there.

-And you like it in here, he said, seeing the scars I couldn't hide.

-This is where I belong, I responded to him.

-Why? he asked.

-Because it's who I am, I said as I raised my head to look back at him for the first time. Who are you? I asked him.

-Avila, he said. A priest from the order of the single God.

-I know it, I told him. 

He smiled faintly but didn't ask anything.

I wanted to tell him that if he had come for my conversion there was no point. I had seen the magic from a young age. I had seen it eventually destroy my family. I knew the Ancient gods were not real. Only the magic was. I knew that cut off from the magic, many of the people returned to the idols of the Ancient gods. We came across these in our pillaging and murdering. But the only god who mattered was the Emperor. He would not live forever but the Empire would.

The Emperor tolerated the different religious cults because they kept people's enmities tightly defined, and gave generously from the funds of their acolytes to the Imperial Treasury.

The order of the single God was different. It paid what the Imperial Treasury said was due, no matter how capricious, but not more. They found followers who were devoted and their works earned them sympathy. The idea of one god did not make much sense to me. I had seen the power of the magic. Perhaps the Ancient gods had been real, men of the strongest magic, or beings from the veins. But if there were one god then the veins would be his, along with all of creation. I did not think it would look the way it did.

I did not want to argue with him. I did not want him there.

-Why are you here? I finally asked him. You followed me here.

-Not just into this cell, he responded. I followed you from the square. I saw what you did.

I didn't remember at that moment. It was how I got here. 

-The guards I said.

-Yeah, all the guards, he responded. But the woman. 

I tried to remember the woman but couldn't. The guardsmen were roughing her up. Did I know why?

-Your magic is strong, he said.

My magic is strong. I thought I remembered that but it sounded new.

-What did I do? I asked him. I was suddenly terrified.

-Tell me what you did, he said.

-I fought the guards. I fought the guards hard and I fought them against themselves, I said, trying to remember. I did not kill them, I added, or I would not be here.

-Not the guards, he said. The woman.

I closed my eyes. I tried to remember. I could not picture her.

-The woman doesn't matter, I said in frustration. I fought the guards because I wanted to. Because everything is wrong and I am wrong.

-No, he said, you're not.

He explained to me that I had healed the woman. I did not remember this. Yes, he said, the guards had been abusing her, and for a long time. She had a crippled leg and a crippled heart.

-I did that, I said instinctively.

-No, he said again. You healed her.

There was nothing there, I could not remember, but he insisted it.

Aylin Shemash, he told me her name and tried to tell me her story. They had crippled her heart, Avila insisted to me, but I had healed it. She was now no longer on the streets of the Imperial capital, nor shut away in some convent or harem. She had found work with a cobbler, and had from her head and her time with a crippled leg extracted a design for a shoe for those whose livelihood demanded them standing on their feet. She who, Avila insisted to me, had been unable to stand, physically or metaphorically, for many seasons.

I tried to remember her but the memory would fade every time I tried to recall it, and then I couldn't even try.

-What does that have to do with me? I asked him when he finished Aylin Shemash's story. 

I felt like I knew her. I felt like I loved her. And I felt like she'd been stolen from me. Avila had put her in my mind where she had not been before but should have been.

-You did it, he said. Don't you see?

-How? I asked him. Tell me how.

-You have to know, he said gently, knowing it would frustrate me. I know it's harder when it burns the memories in the process. Try to remember he said.

I tried to get inside my brain. There were so many holes. It burns. It burns better. The memories burn. My magic was strong, my magic is strong.

-There's a price for everything, I mumbled. I wasn't sure.

-Right! he said with excitement. You murdered and you plundered, he said, and your magic was strong. And you paid for it--

-With my memories, I said to finish for him, feeling like I understood something for the first time. I was here.

-Yes! he said, and then calmed down. It doesn't have to be destructive, he said as he put his hand on my shoulder to look me in the eye. He had come from his corner very close to me.

-It will always be destructive to me, I said, and knew it was true when I said it.

-Yes, he said quietly, and dropped his hands.