Chapter One

The boy woke up screaming, muscles tightening under a pain he couldn’t even begin to describe. A brief respite let him open his eyes, he saw a woman sitting in front of him. She was wearing well made embroidered clothing. She had a grave smile on her face and small streaks of gray in her hair. Her face tickled memories he couldn't quite reach. There was a sadness in her eyes, a grief that tore at his heart.

He wanted to ask her what was wrong.

He opened his mouth to make a sound of comfort, he himself was not sure what, only to find that nothing flowed passed his lips.

Before he even finished his attempt at comforting the woman, she pointed her finger at him, and pain coursed through his body like lightning, his muscles rapidly twitching, flexing for all their worth. He flopped around on the floor like a fish, the pain searing all thoughts from his mind. After what seemed like an eternity, he finally had an opportunity to catch his breath. Tears pooled on the floor next to his face and he could feel himself drooling, a pungent odor pierced his nostrils notifying him that he had lost control of his bladder.

He opened his mouth once more and tried to convey something to the grief-stricken woman, a single question. One simple word, why?

She smiled at him a pained expression upon her face, her gaze hardening as she stretched her finger, pointing the dreaded digit in his direction. In a desperate attempt to dodge the boy tried to jump to the side only to hit an invisible barrier. The pain hit him once more taking away any control he had of his body and he blacked out.

It took him a while to wake up. To his relief the woman was nowhere to be seen, he struggled to sit up, aching muscles refusing to cooperate. It didn’t take him long to notice that he had barely any room to move. His cell, comprised of strange invisible walls, wasn’t even large enough to allow him to lie down. He looked around, seeing others like him lying in crunched together forms or sitting in similar cages. Four girls across from him with three boys to his left, all sitting there terrified, teary-eyed. Some had ripped clothing, others had fancier clothing at some point. The fear had degraded them all to the same feral foundation. A panicked child, a helpless situation.

He tried to ask them what was going on, yet as soon as he tried to convey the question, he was forced to swallow it. Once again the words could not cross the threshold of his lips. He glanced over at the boy closest to him, barely a foot away. The boy had dirty hay coloured hair and high-quality clothes, there were tears in his eyes as he looked at him. The blond boy pointed to his throat and shook his head. He pointed to his own throat and nodded his understanding then they both sat back against their wall. Eventually, all the children woke up, yet the room was shrouded in an eery blanket of silence. The forced silence was a dreadful pressure on the mind, accentuating the boy’s lack of memory and understanding of the situation. No matter the desperate grasps he made towards his mind to remember something, anything. He was given nothing.

The door to the boys’ right opened and he saw the lady enter again. All the children scurried away into the corner furthest away from the evil old hag, as he had decided to call her. He, however, refused to back away, he did his utmost to glare the evil hag to death. Not that there was any merit to his attempt at courage, the hag only returned another of her sad smiles. It did, however, have the unwanted effect of making the hag head his way. She stepped right into his cage, slowly raised her arm and stretched her finger. The boy tried to jump at her only to be smashed into the wall behind him. The back of his head crashed into the invisible barrier, his sight blacking out for the slightest moment till the pain coursed through his veins. Muscles tightened and his eyes felt like they would pop out as he struggled on the floor, clawing at the concrete, desperately trying to dig his way out. Fingernails tearing at the attempt, that small token of pain eclipsed by the magical lightning coursing through his body. The torment lasted seconds, minutes, perhaps more, until the world faded out and he lost his consciousness.

He woke up to the near exact same sight as before. This time, however, the other children were lying in their own magical cages, passed out. They slowly woke up one by one, and as soon as the last girl opened her eyes the door opened again and the witch entered. Once again the children shied away, once again he refused to. He noticed one particular girl with dark hair reacting similarly to him, glaring at the woman and refusing to back down.

Even he himself could not have told anyone why he refused to back away. Once again, the hag entered his cage and once again he tried to attack her. Once again he failed and the pain flared through his body until he passed out. The pattern repeated itself multiple times until at one point they all woke up and the witch did not enter. He supposed even the hag needed her sleep. He could really use some himself. He tried to move, yet his burning muscles betrayed his desperate attempts. He managed to roll over, collapsing onto the floor in a slightly more comfortable position than his last.

He looked at the boy next to him and their eyes met. Struggling to lift his arm he eventually managed to point at the boy and shrugged, then lifted an eyebrow. The blond, presumably noble, boy understood the gesture and started painstakingly signing with his hands. It took them a few minutes to get it figured out, various gestures were coupled to words they knew, then redone when they realized the other didn't understand. It took them a while to manage something concrete. A name, Klostum. The boy thought it peculiar that he did not know the words the boy meant to convey yet he still managed to somehow reach an understanding.

Klostum pointed at him and shrugged and raised his eyebrow, the boy answered with a shrug for he could not remember his own name, he could not remember anything other than the dreadful cage they found themselves trapped in. Klostum stared at him and frowned, tapping his chin. He raised his finger in delight and made a sign with three fingers at the boy. The thumb, index and middle fingers were raised and the others were curled into his palm. The boy stared at Klostum, not understanding what he was trying to tell him. Klostum pointed at him and made the symbol again. To confirm, the boy made the symbol for the third time and pointed at himself. Klostum nodded in excitement.

The name Three? Why should he take the name Three? After giving it some thought he shrugged, it was a name just as any other, it was an improvement upon being nameless.

Three stared at Klostum for a while longer before nodding, Klostum grinned and they sat together for a few more minutes, slowly but surely creating their own sign-language. He noticed that around the room the others were doing the same with their neighbors, once in a while everyone would glance around and copy gestures from the others that they understood. Soon enough all of them gave into exhaustion, despite the time they spent unconscious, and fell asleep, dreading what they expected the next day to bring.

‘There is always the hope the hag will die in her sleep.’ Three thought wistfully, for it was a dream that even he thought unlikely. Yet it was a hope to cling to, however small.

Morning came and the hag had yet to show her face. Three figured that she was just the type to sleep in, he was strangely sure of this fact. Making eye contact with the others, they decided to resume their previous effort of making their own sign language. A few hours later, the hag entered the room once more and her torturous spell was aimed at the girl across from him. Seeing the spell hit the others before it made its way to him was somehow worse than feeling it himself, he felt connected to the others, seeing them spasming on the floor left a seed of anger growing in the pit of his stomach.

He glared at the hag as she went from girl to girl, pointing her finger at them, and that was when he noticed something. Any fluid that left the girls, be it blood, tears, or something else, was absorbed into the runic markings that laid the foundation for the invisible barrier that surrounded them. Did they get their energy from whatever exuded from their bodies? Or did it simply absorb anything it could? It left him thinking before his thoughts were interrupted by Klostum collapsing to the torture. He glared at the hag before she did the same to him.

Three started noticing more and more peculiarities about the runic markings and he shared them with the rest of the group. Everyone did their utmost to notice new things about the markings, understanding them might give them a chance to break or disable them long enough to make their escape. No such luck, things got even worse after the first day because everyone started getting hungry, their captors did not bother feeding them.

The second day passed, then the third and she had yet to feed them or give them any kind of sustenance. When they woke on the fourth day to their aching stomachs and sore throats, a strange message appeared in their visage. Strangely enough, he could understand the words although he was sure that he did not have the ability to write.

{Skill : Pain-Tolerance acquired}

{Skill : Pain-Tolerance Level one}

He looked at the others and they also seemed to be thinking about the message in confusion, he did his best to ask the others if the same had happened to them, and they signed back that each of them had gotten a similar message. He tried thinking about its significance before his thoughts were interrupted by his rumbling stomach, the hunger was growing worse. It had turned to pain, the lack of food gnawing at his stomach, begging for food. The thirst was more prominent, a burning sensation in his stomach. The dry throat begging for liquid, his lips crusted in blood and split from dehydration.

The hag appeared through the door and the torture continued, the pattern repeating from hour to hour. More torture, sometimes they would gain a level in pain-tolerance which eased the pain they felt by a sliver. Yet each time the pain tolerance leveled up the hag seemed to know and changed her spell so it hurt them even more than it did before. Their hunger and thirst reached the limits of what a human could endure after the fifth day, Three and the others went to bed not expecting to get up in the morning.

Unfortunately, they weren’t that lucky.

{Skill : Lesser-Regeneration acquired}

{Skill : Lesser-Regeneration Level one}

{Perk : Mana-Sustenance acquired}

Three was confused by the announcement, but he no longer felt hungry or thirsty so he counted that as a blessing. Even if it did prolong the time that he had to live under the torturous treatment. That was until the hag arrived that day and noticed that they had acquired the new skill and perk. She smiled that sad smile that made Three want to rip her throat out and entered his cage. This time the torture was not a simple finger pointing however, he was slammed face first into the invisible wall opposite of the hag. Then she slashed at his back and he felt something slice through his skin. He attempted to roar and struggle in pain, fear and pure undulturated rage. The enchantments kept him from wiggling even a finger, his voice was muted just as it had been from the first day. This new torture method went on for longer than the other one, soon enough the blood spilling from his back would have created a pool below his dangling feet if the enchantments hadn’t sucked it all up, Three collapsed to the ground too tired to even remain standing.

He glanced at the witch to see her nodding to herself, for some strange reason it seemed to him she was encouraging herself, he thought he saw her shiver but he had to be imagining it, before moving on to Klostum. The rest of them all went through the same treatment. Even though the actual pain was less than the finger pointing spell, the presence of physical and lasting damage was exhausting. Once more a pattern appeared, the hag entered the room, if their wounds from the physical day had not healed enough yet she used the finger pointing pain spell if they had healed enough she used the slashing spell.

Days turned to weeks, weeks to months, but Three had long since lost count. His pain-tolerance had leveled up to eleven, and lesser-regeneration to nine. The group had one small silver lining however, they had finally finished their own sign language. They could communicate with each other and that small bond of connection kept them sane. Three wondered what it would have been like if the hag had separated them, leaving them alone in the dark with nothing but pain and torture to look forward to. So the group bonded, like only a group of children under the most terrible of circumstances could.

Then the hag once more upped her experiments, she walked up to Three with a black globe of something in her hand, the ball drooped like a thick black liquid, and although its black drops of whatever it was hit the floor every now and then, the sphere did not reduce in size. The Hag pushed Three against the wall, then he felt the liquid core of darkness push through the skin of his back and he screamed, screamed like he never had before. Even though he made no sound, it was obvious to the others that whatever the hag was doing now hurt more than anything she had done previously. Three collapsed onto the ground unmoving.

He woke up. Struggling with himself, he tried to get up, but he could not move. He just lay there, staring at the wall his head was facing, not having the energy to move. It took a while for him to gain control over his body, until he finally managed to he sit up, only to stare at his hands. His fingernails were black, not a regular black, not the simple darkness of a night, it was somehow deeper, darker than even the blackest of nights.

Then he noticed the veins running below his skin. The normally prevalent blue was no longer there, instead, black lines snaked over his arms in place of his veins. Then he noticed his skin, it was much paler than it had been before, an ivory he had not seen elsewhere. He was studiously staring at his own body when he noticed motion from Klostum’s cage. He glanced over only to almost instinctively shrink back. By sheer effort of will on his part he managed to suppress it to a flinch. The somewhat large and previously chubby neighbor of his had changed dramatically.

Klostum’s skin was now a dark gray, thick and rough. Thicker plates covered his elbows, knees and perhaps other parts of his body. Most importantly the boy had grown, and not just a few centimeters either, he was at least a good foot taller than he had been before, and almost twice as broad. The hair on top of his head was no longer the dirty hay blonde, but a shimmering silver. He looked around at the others as they started to get up, each and every one of them had changed.

The boy next to Klostum, who called himself Strem, had grown thin, skeletally thin even, and he had become near transparent. His skin was azure, a strange ethereal color that made him slightly hard to look at. The boy at the far end had turned into goo. For a moment Three thought Jer had been disintegrated into a puddle until the goo started coming together and forming a person very similar to Jer, except that his eyes, pupil, eye white and anything else, had become cerulean and he was drenched as if he had just jumped into a lake.

He looked at the girls. The girl directly across from him, named Valana, had gained bulk and had gray fur with stripes of red and a darker orange here and there. As she woke up she reverted to something resembling her previous self, the thick dark braid she had and the amber eyes staring at her hairier than normal arms in confusion. The girl next to Valana, named Sumi, was made from string, actual string and cloth, that was knitting and sewing itself together to form a person, one that when finished, stared at her own arms and body in horror.

Yinta, her neighbour was running her hands over her body in panic, bark having replaced her skin and her hair had turned to grass. The last girl, Fliít, was switching from normal to a being made of fire and back to normal, looking at herself more in interest than horror. She had been the one most aggressive and resistant towards the hag. Three could not help but be slightly awed by her calm reaction.

They had all changed, some more than the others. Before they could panic and discuss more about their changes, a whole group of people entered the room, not just the hag but seven other individuals with similar clothing, age and bearing as the hag. Each stepped in front of a cage and continued their torturous patterns from before. This time however, there was no break. Each day, when the hag slept, every few hours the group of individuals would switch and their torture would commence until they had passed out. Weeks turned to months turned to years. Three did not know, for he had lost all sense of time. There was only closing your eyes after suffering through agony only to open them to more torture.

He was no longer lucid enough to remember if he had gotten any notifications. He spent every waking moment he had thinking about ways to get out of the walls binding him, knowing in his heart of hearts the others were doing the same. He pinned most of his hopes on Jer, he was easily the smartest person in the room and that included the evil hag troop that was governing their lives. Three noticed more and more how connected he felt to the others, so every time they pointed a finger at him or cut open his skin he repeated the names of his friends, his comrades, even if that word was not strong enough to depict the bond he felt shaping. It was more like... family, yet even stronger still.

The names Klostum, Strem, Jer, Fliít, Sumi, Yinta, Valana. He held them close to his heart, taking courage and strength from their presence, their very existence. At the same time, a dark and festering seed burrowed into his heart, a hate aimed solely at the evil hag troop and whatever purpose they had. He allowed the festering seed to grow and flourish under the torture. Deep roots grasped his heart, growing ever more from his resentment and fury.