Pain. Endless pain. Torment, and three delicious prey somewhere above me, the steadfast thrum of their hearts penetrating the constant agony. They were still there, even after all this time. Meals, waiting for me to feast on them. I grasped for their presence with a desperate splinter of fragmented consciousness. I embraced the soothing dual-note lullaby of their weak little hearts, letting it sing me to torpor with its promises of contented satiation, of feast and famine, of an end to this endless torment of ravaged flesh.

Soon. Free. Soon.

Three heartbeats became six. Then three again.

Two delectable meals joined the constant three, stirring me to wakefulness once more. They thought themselves so clever, posturing barely out of reach, tempting me with the now familiar and smug aromas of tender Spring-chicken and self-loathing Creeping-brown-vines. Oh, that enticing thrum in their veins. Their voices droned and droned, buzzing with poisoned questions, as if I would still answer after that. Ah, those two appetizingly naive snacks, so firm in their false belief of safety. So intoxicating, their misplaced trust in their own traps. Already, they had crafted their own demise. I focussed on their taste alone, and sank away into nothingness once more.

Soon, Dad. Soon.

Three beating hearts. Six. Three again.

A sudden twitch of a muscle roused me. The ugly waft of prison slop soured the air. A hint of panic rose up from the warm fleshy snack preserved in my embrace. The prey-child croaked beneath me. It was only the first half-note of a pleading wail before he remembered me and restrained his vocalization in primal fear. My snack’s aborted cry echoed between the deep, damp walls of my prison-hole.

I stirred.

Under me, my little snack trembled. The sickly, horror-stricken heart of the boy I cradled sang so much louder in my ears than those of the prey far above. All it would take was a single bite, a tantalizing nibble and I would be strong again. Only the tingling, burning reminder of the Tonaltus crawling along my overboiled flesh kept me from chomping down. As long as the containment field over my cell was in place, any feeding was pointless. Tearing down that field would require more time. Preparation.

Soon. Eventually.

The bowl of food, being lowered into the deep through an improvised system, was hardly worth my notice. The daily ritual of feeding my snack was merely another example of human weakness, another confirmation that they would not hold me forever.

Yet the fragile fingers of my snack creeping towards the bowl of offered food, that was worth paying attention to. One fevered breath at a time, the boy’s fingers edged closer. Slower, every meal. Weaker, every day. A wet slap. The dim rattle of a bowl nearly toppled. A trembling heave. A hiccup. Nothing. Hopelessness. Defeat.

The chill hiss of annoyance that escaped my lips trickled down the fever-drenched back of my snack. The boy didn’t care, didn’t even bother to flinch anymore. Too weak. Too close to dying to feed himself.

I strained my neck, my tiny and frail form struggling forward until my fangs brushed past a spine. Questing onwards I sought my way up towards the nape of his neck. Hunger howled. Temptation, impossible to deny. It unmoored me, threatened to swallow me in a vicious and endless storm of need. But I was stronger than the desires of my nature. With a gentle caress, the slightest pull of my teeth on his neck, I led my little snack to his food.

Nice food. Gentle food. Feed my food. Snack my snack. Eat. Grow strong. Live. Soon you will feed me.

With my desperate mantra sung, and my snack sated and calm, torpor carried me away from relentless hunger once more.

Three beating hearts. Six. Three again.

Hunger, always hunger, and food right there, underneath me.

Just a little nibble, a tiny little bite?

No. No bite. Too weak. Won’t be able to stop. Need to conserve the food until I can escape.

Three beating hearts. Six.

An aborted gasp.

Five and a hint of blood?

I stirred, struggling myself out of torpor in urgent haste, rousing myself into a state of wakefulness that I had long ago given up on. I was so starved I hardly knew where I was, memory and clarity returning only in hazy fragments. Yet even then, I was present enough to understand that something vital had changed.

I blinked, a reflex, a pointless habit. My gummed-up eyelids frayed apart from the sudden motion. The pain of it stirred me awake that much faster. On instinct, I flexed a tendril of my Metzus. Ambient Tonaltus scorched it to shreds, burning through the questing tendril and tunneling straight into my core. Reminding me of my situation in absolute, painful clarity.

Containment field. Inquisitors. Captured. Dungeon.

Hissing in agony, I forced myself past the pain and shifted my weight, willing my battered ten-year-old girl vessel into motion. The Tonaltus scalded, seared, and boiled away my control. It burned, rooted, and dug into my sanity until only one involuntary thought remained.

Feed!

On instinct, my fangs lunged towards the neck of my snack. I screamed, both in pain and in a desperate bid to keep from chomping down. I howled in agony and fury both, but only a ragged gasp escaped my torn-up lips. Lungs were needed to produce sound, but all I had in my chest was a gaping hole of torment.

Heaving and shivering I continued to fight my predatory urges, and the prey that lay pressed underneath me lived.

Why am I doing this? Why am I torturing myself?

Just stop. Don’t think. Don’t feel. Just... Just...

No.

Something changed.

The inevitable, human mistake. Carelessness that might allow me to escape.

The soft grinding of steel on steel echoed through the cell above, and then down the walls of my oubliette. The slow whine of rarely-oiled hinges followed after. Unfamiliar-tasting prey entered. Hushed murmurs and spoken words that my fogged-up thoughts failed to make sense of drifted down into the shadowy dark. Fear, anxiety, and excitement tinged the air, breaking through even the stink of rot in my hole. A wet and heavy dragging sound followed, as dead meat and metal and cloth slid over damp stones.

Once my nose attached meaning to those last sounds, it nearly pushed all reason from my mind once more. It was the sensual waft of freshly spilled food being pulled into my cell.

Opening my mouth I inhaled every taste of it. I sucked the delicious anticipation that laced the air past longingly aching teeth and melted lips. I breathed it in. I breathed, and breathed, and breathed until all of that tantalizing scent was gone and I could once more taste the rot of my own flesh, and think beyond my hunger.

Focus. Focus, focus, focus!

I inhaled once more, letting the acrid fumes emanating from my slimy, putrefying flesh fill my nostrils. What remained of my body was no longer a solid mass, but a liquid mess that drooped over my little snack and covered the stone floor of my hole. And even that which remained was little more than a head, a torso, and half a leg. Dismembered. No arms at all. I used that sobering reminder of my predicament to push past the starvation. Something was happening, something important, right above me. Now if only my Metzus-starved mind would manage to string what I was hearing together into a coherent story.

Five?

Why five Inquisitors?

The answer to that question was right there. The conclusion should have been obvious. But my memories were just as mushy as the rest of me, and what little I could recall of my time spent in this cell was tinted through a haze of feral hunger. Reasoning my way towards even the simplest of conclusions seemed an insurmountable task, every half-a-thought sidetracked by starvation.

Despite the agony that I knew would follow, I shifted once more. It was a minute repositioning of my mutilated stumps to better prepare myself for what was to come. Blessedly, only a vague pull registered on my seared nerves as parts of my skin stuck to my snack when I moved. Strips of my flesh stretched and tore until they peeled right off my bones, and I was so far gone that I hardly even felt it.

Underneath me the prey whimpered, awoken by my stirring. Fresh terror bled off it. It had not sensed me moving this much since I had crawled on top of it. It feared its time had come.

I hissed comfortingly into its ear and my snack stilled beneath me, yet whimpered louder. As the boy’s pathetic hollow voice slowly broke into pleading sobs, I clamped my jaws around his neck, fangs brushing his jugular. A little nudge, a gentle coo, a warning hiss, and after a little more coaxing, my pre-escape meal stilled his pathetic display.

When the opportunity came, my snack would serve its purpose. He would give his puny life to heal my charred and melted vessel. Then I would be gone. But for now — I loosened my grip on his neck — he would live.

Finally, with the stillness of the prey beneath me, the reality of what was happening in the dungeon above my oubliette sank in. Whoever these Inquisitors were, they did not taste like my usual interrogators, and they weren’t the parade of nobles they had shown me off to either. The five remaining heartbeats had dragged the corpse of the sixth into my cell. Instead of the usual changing of my guards, the three replacements had killed one of the three that had finished their shift.

Inquisitor had just killed Inquisitor, right outside my cell.

It was the mistake I’d been waiting for. These humans that had captured me, they were only prey. They did not know about the wait in the way that I did. It is a game of patience, of letting the time where nothing at all happens disappear until only the significant moments remain. That was their one mistake. Instead of killing me, they’d captured me. They locked me up and guarded me as if they were the predators. They were but prey. They knew nothing of the slow hunt. Now, inevitably, their pathetic prey vigilance had wavered. A fatal error had been made. The Inquisitors had killed one of their own. My patience had been rewarded. An opportunity to exploit their weakness had arrived.

If only I could.

I let my awareness brush against the energies around me. Nothing had changed there. The Tonaltus-based containment field around my cell was still there, debilitating as always. The field was harmless to humans who had an Atlus-based body, but would ravage — could even kill — creatures of Metzus like me.

I was not restricted to Metzus for my magic. I could craft my own Atlus weaves. Could even manage very weak Tonaltus ones, albeit at the cost of grievous harm to my own body. None of those would help me. I was held in place by the Tonaltus field and the walls of the cell, and magic was not a tool wielded from a distance. Projecting a weave away from yourself, quickly robbed it of its power. Much quicker still here in my cell. Maybe they had done something to the floor and wall of the oubliette. Perhaps it was something peculiar in the Tonaltus. Or maybe I was simply so weak I couldn’t manage anything anymore. Early in my capture, I had been so certain that I could break past whatever suppressed my magic and tear the Tonaltus field apart, if only I applied enough time and attention.

I had tried. I had failed. I had given in to weakness and hunger.

Hunger.

Merely thinking the thought made my thoughts collapse in on themselves. High above me, five meals spoke in hushed whispers. I should have been paying attention to what they were saying, but all I could think of was the delicious mix of their anxiety and excitement wafting down and pushing past even the stink of decomposing flesh, putrid wounds, and excrements that dominated my hole in the ground.

I waited, and attempted to channel my desperate desire to feed into the crafting of a plan. Five Inquisitors was a lot to fight my way past, especially with only half a leg and no arms, and with the Tonaltus field crippling me even further. But five was also five meals. Six meals if I counted the one they had killed. Seven with my own little snack.

A feast, a glorious slaughter!

Shadows flickered as the light of torches being lit peeled away at the darkness. One of those torches was plunged into my hole. Light danced on the damp walls, illuminating my pit in reflected hues of moss-green stone.

My pet snack gasped, startled by the sudden light.

Above, one of my soon-to-be meals retched. Such a pathetic reaction, them needing to actually witness the horror-hole they had dumped me in before they could be sickened by it. As if they did not know what they did here, to me, to the boy. As if by simply not looking at it, as if by not acknowledging it, their own inhuman treatment of us could be ignored and forgotten.

A single burning light fell down towards us, fast growing into a brilliant glare. It hit the bottom with a wet splat, followed by a burbling hiss. Shadows trembled in deepening swirls as the fire of the torch struggled against the goop it had landed in. The light dimmed, then flared again, as against all odds the torch won against the gunk. First hesitant, then with a sudden rush the flames rose higher, licking at the rags worn by the boy lying underneath me.

One of the three male prey above me whimpered at the sight of me and my snack in the pit. “Oh gods, oh gods, oh gods, this was a bad idea.”

A determined female voice cut through the wailing. “Oh Canth, you poor little pudding,” the female demeaned her sniveling male companion, then addressed the others. “Piers, stay. The rest of you, guard the door, pretend nothing is wrong.”

Her orders, issued in a low voice, held a strong edge of authority that contrasted deliciously with her taste of honey-sweet elderberry poison. It was such a refined fragrance. One I’d savor greatly. If I had a choice she would be the first. Or maybe the last, to better enjoy her.

A plume of noxious charcoal stink joined the melange of disgusting scents, displacing my hunger long enough for me to become aware of the eager snapping and crackling of flames that had found fresh fuel. My little snack hissed in pain, then squirmed, buckling underneath with an energy I thought long ago snuffed out. And finally, as the flames licking at his leg burned even brighter, Arrin screamed.

I pushed down on my pet, spreading more of my flaking flesh over his back. Gritting my teeth at the lancing pain that shot through me, I sidled sideways and batted the torch aside with the stump of a leg. The greedy, fiery thing rolled away, spluttering once more as it got buried further into the dank gunk.

Without the torch to fuel it, the little tongues of fire that had taken hold of the moist, moldy rags around my pet’s leg snuffed out. Then the torch sizzled out as well. It left my snack sniffling in darkness once more.

Above, the door to my cell clanked shut, turning three of the five heartbeats into little more than a dull throb. The two meals that remained went to work. Metal groaned, then snapped. Chains rattled and hinges creaked as one by one the many layers of physical protection keeping me from the food above were stripped away.

“Valentina!” the Elderwood-poison female hissed down at me. “We’re here to get you out. Going to open the grate now.” Several seconds of silence followed, and then she spoke again, much quieter, in a tone I probably was not supposed to hear. “Please don’t kill me.”

True to her words, the large metal grate covering my oubliette was opened for the third time since I woke up here. The way out was open. I was free, not that I saw myself climbing out in my current state. No clever plans either. Only Arrin’s neck, close enough to sink my fangs into it.

“Rope!”

The sudden shout from the Honey-sweet elder-poison female caught me with my fangs ready to pierce the boy’s skin. So far gone that I couldn’t even differentiate between thought and action.

“Wait, you’re seriously going down there?” the one remaining male up there asked, the one the female had called Piers.

“Does she look like she can climb out of there unassisted?” the far too brave female pointed out.

“That’s my point, Irina,” Remorseful-morsel Piers droned in a sad monotone, almost as if he knew that arguing was pointless, but was going through the motions anyway. “Does that look anything like the harmless little girl we were supposed to find?”

“Piers, Piers, Piers.” The female tutted. “That boy they tossed in with her, he just screamed. The child they wanted her to snack on is still alive, Honeybee. That’s an entire kid’s worth of food they gave her and she’s kept him alive instead. I’ll take my chances.”

The end of a heavy rope landed on my back. I ignored the urge to shake the rope off of me. Instead, I coiled my muscles and readied myself for the inevitable.

The female descended into my oubliette with the ease of a lifetime scaling up and down walls. Orange light descended with her, as she carried a second torch down. With a squelch, her boot landed into the excretion of my pet snack. She gagged at the horrid stench down here, hands instinctively rising to cover her mouth.

Because of it, her hands also rose out of easy reach of her weapons.

With all the power I could muster in my mangled, amputated limbs, I pounced.