Completed [Holiday Challenge] Stealing The Light IV

[Tazrae]

Timestamp: 70th of Winter, 521 A.V.

Continued From: [Holiday Challenge] Stealing The Light III

Cedar’s eyes widened at the last two names Taz mentioned before she said Kihala’s name. It was as if he recognized them, though he didn’t otherwise react. Instead, he changed the topic. “What about Rhaus? Did you pray to the one that marked you?” He asked, something else, something powerful, in his eyes.

Tazrae smiled, then shook her head. “I never pray to Him. I sing to Him instead. I play to Him always. My heart beats to His heart beat. I feel like He knows everything that happens to me because He’s right there beside me, touching me through the music in my life.” She said, offering Cedar a smile, one full of love. Her words were heart felt and sincere, as if she were standing before her God and confessing this to him instead of Cedar.

Things were falling in place and making sense, finally.

Cedar met her smile then and reached out, bending forward to stroke his hand along the shape of her head and cup the back of her neck where her gnosis mark to Rhaus was. She felt a burning there, where his fingers touched the mark and also where her forehead and his briefly met skin to skin. They communed in silence a moment as the clef note on her neck duplicated itself under Cedar’s touch. One breath passed, then another, until he pulled back from her silently.

Kami, startled by the move, turned and wrung out the bloody cloth in the basin of water she’d fetched to help clean Tazrae up. The girl was giving them privacy, though there wasn’t any in the tent. Kami’s cheeks were in high color, though her eyes did dart between Tazrae and Cedar, from beneath her lashes. She trembled then, slightly in fear, as if just recognizing something she’d been able to see all along. Tazrae’s sister was a stranger, but even Taz could tell Kami wasn’t stupid.

“I wouldn’t leave you alone, without help, stranded here. Especially when half of this is my fault. You needed to meet him, Tazrae. He needed to be tested so we could see what he was made of. We needed to use you to help bring him to our cause or convince us once and for all he needed to be taken off the board as a liability. You accomplished that. He’s not a lost cause, though still as dangerous today as he was when he was born.” Cedar said, speaking of Alric.

Then he continued on about Tazrae. “But now it will be up to you to win yourself free of this place and return home. And you must warn them and him, filling in the gaps to the story you now have. And you should take Kami with you. Your voice will help you, moreso now than ever. Her healing might save any of you at any time as well. I cannot break my cover to help further. Nico is to important, as is his presence here. But there might be more help coming. Live through the night, Tazrae. Get free. And warn the settlement. You too, Kami. Go with her. You will find a refuge where she is, but you must fight to keep it. ” Cedar said, his voice full of command, full of what and who he was.

Words: 552

[Tazrae]

Tazrae nodded, promising that she would live through the night. And that she would get free of this place, somehow, though that way wasn’t even remotely clear to her. Tied behind her back, her hands were numb as were her shoulders and arms where the bindings forced the limbs in an unnatural angle. But Taz had something she didn’t have before. She had answers, and a reason to get free… a promise to keep.

Kami, it seemed, didn’t look so certain.

Cedar rose then, limping back to his chair and to his writing, ignoring both girls as if they didn’t exist. Kami picked up her towels and the basin of water she’d brought, and gave Tazrae a long look. “He will hurt you tonight… not just to pry from you what you know, but because he enjoys it. But he will also drink and drink a lot. Weigh the bottle to his stamina, and hope to the Gods he passes out before he goes very far. If he knows who you are, he will take out his anger at Grandfather on you. He does so on me daily. In the early morning hours, it will be the best time to run… before Syna rises and before his liquor stupor wears off. The men outside will be drunk as well, because they are not the good sort either. I don’t think… tonight will go well. To many died, and hes responsible for their deaths. He will be angrier than normal when he returns. He will send Cedar away, and he may or may not send for me. We will see.” She said softly, her large green eyes full of worry. “You are strong. Just don’t let him see too much of that. If you do, he will enjoy it all the more.” Kami said, then rose as well, slipping out of the tent.

Taz could tell the sun was going down. It always fell fast in the jungle, long before Syna completely disappeared from the sky. Her stomach growled and she felt suddenly all alone, even though she knew there was a God sitting across the room from her. It was a comfort, in a way, because Rhaus… the man known as Cedar… muttered as he worked on his research. To the world, it looked like he was making notes on the flora and fauna of the expedition. But in reality, Tazrae could hear his whispers as he actually made notes on Nico and his party… who and what they were, even notes on Tazrae which made her smile softly.

After a time, Nico did return. The man was anything but clean, smelling of sweat, blood, and the jungle’s tangy earth. He had a bottle in his hand, one he took a pull from every few minutes as he wandered around. Passing Cedar, he kicked at the bard and gestured towards the door. “Out. I want a word with our prisoner.” He ordered, which caused Cedar to stand up and without a look at Tazrae, he limped by heading out… the very picture of the a man submitting to his superior.

Tazrae watched closely as she thought about that, about why Cedar was among the people, as a normal person, not even remotely throwing his weight around. It wasn’t something she understood, but she didn’t consider it a weakness.

Words: 558

[Tazrae]

Nico set his bottle down at the tea service, walked over to her, and hauled her to her feet by her hair. It hurt, the pain blinding through her scalp partially due to the previous damage and partially because hair pulling was just unholy painful. Taz couldn’t help but cry out as he dragged her up. She staggered, finding her legs a bit numb where she’d sat as Nico sneered at her. He shook his head, disgusted, and looked her over. “Stand there… and do not move.” He ordered and turned moving deeper into the tent.

He moved around the large gathering table in the middle and reached under it to flip some hooks underneath. The whole table seemed to come loose and he swiveled it, inverting the top which formed a sort of frame that housed what looked like a rack with a big roller on the top and a big roller on the bottom. Each roller had rope wrapped around it with cranks at the head and foot.

Nico came up to Taz, unfastened the leash from the tent pole, and dragged her over to the table, picking her up and throwing her onto the rack. Taz began to fight, truthfully the moment he unfastened the leash, but Nico was fast and anticipated everything she did and countered it with blows that left her reeling and stunned. She tried to turn and crawl off it, but that move just gave him access to her arms which he cut free of their bindings almost immediately. Suddenly able to move her arms, Tazrae tried to control them, but her arms had been bound so long she only flopped them uselessly, circulation completely gone. She hissed in frustration at the non-cooperation of her body.

A moment was all Nico needed. He traded the knife and he made a fist in a move almost too fast for her to follow.

Taz tried to strike him again, but he landed a punch straight to her face – not even a hard one – and she flopped like a fish as the injury to the back of her head woke back up from where it had been seemingly sleeping after Kami’s treatment. As she shook her injured head, trying to fight the man, he got to work. Before she understood what was happening, her arms were lifted up and bound above her head, independent of each other.

Then, he did the same to her feet until she was stretched across the rack, the full length of the front of her body exposed. Shaking, the bonds held her tight as he moved back and forth from her head to her feet, cranking the handles until she was stretched and her back was arched.

“I like racks. I always carry one with me. The big wood of the table disguises its true purpose and when its flipped, it tends to catch the blood.” He said, smiling gently. Now that she was restrained, he walked back to the tea service and retrieved the bottle he’d sat down there. Taking a large pull, he swallowed once, twice, and gestured to her with the bottle.

“We are going to have a little chat. You are going to tell me everything you know about this place… where you live, who you live with, and in fact who you are. Once you do that, then we can move on to the next phase. If you don’t talk, I’ll start stretching you out. It will just be uncomfortable at first, but later on it will hurt. And I might help that along, as we go, because I do like to hear a woman scream.” He added, then set his bottle down and opened a cupboard and pulled out a bucket. He arranged it beneath the now-inverted table in the corner. Taz, who could still move her head, saw that the table had a drain in that corner… the bucket was to catch her blood.

Words: 660

[Tazrae]

Taz’s mind filled with fear at the fact he brought the bucket out. She couldn’t have known it was a sort of phycological warfare. The young Innkeeper should have known better, but her experience in life was so limited she had no idea the tricks people played to instill fear. She’d been worried about rape, being beaten, but this man was going to tear her limbs off and bleed her enough to fill a bucket. Taz didn’t know if she had enough blood in her to even fill a bucket.

Shivering, she focused on anything but him… staring up at the poles that made up the tent and wondering how her life had come to this. She knew evil people existed in the world, but until you crossed paths with one, it was seriously hard to understand things like sadism and the nature of people that took pleasure in others’ pain.

Five chimes in, Tazrae knew things would not be easy. He waited for exactly two breaths before he cut her, letting her blood flow to the point she realized that stretching her until her arms tore off was the last thing he intended to do. And the worst? For the first bell, he asked her no questions. He just seemed to want to know the limits of her screams and what would cause a reaction in her and what would not. Tazrae had it in her head that when people were tortured, their minds took them off to someplace nice so they could endure the pain. Her brain was not so kind.

The man simply drank and made a thousand cuts, tracing patterns across her copper skin in her ruby blood. And when her cries got so hoarse, he could barely hear them, he took another pull of his liquor and asked her if she’d like a drink. When she didn’t answer, he poured a bit of the liquor over the worst of the cuts just to see if he could get more sound out of her. And when that didn’t work, he put away the knife. He took down his pants and cupped himself in his free hand. It was then Tazrae figured he’d rape her. But he did not. Instead, he loosened a stream of urine across her face and mouth, laughing when she clamped her lips shut and turned her head, trying to avoid the warm liquid.

Nico tucked himself neatly away when he was evidently fully relieved, and redoubled his drinking and cutting. It was a nightmare come to life the way he knew how to get blood from her and leave minimal scarring. And as he got deeper into his drinking, he started to lose a sense of who she was and why she was there, instead only enjoying the pleasure of her pain instead of asking her any pertinent questions. He had, at first, asked questions about herself personally. Was she out there alone? How did she like the jungle? They were obvious things, to Tazrae. How could he think she lived out here alone? People needed other people to survive places like Falyndar.

But he didn’t mention Syka, as if it hadn’t occurred to him that she’d be from there and out so far. Taz would have liked to have said she didn’t answer a single question. She’d have liked to have said later that she remained quiet. But that wasn’t the truth. She answered every question he asked of her. And she found out fairly early she wasn’t one of those prisoners that wouldn’t make a sound even as flesh was carved up and her body stretched. She sang like a parrot, screaming and begging, shouting the answers to questions he didn’t even bother to ask.



Words: 624

[Tazrae]

And it soon became apparent to her that he was unbalanced, perhaps even insane. For he loved the blood. He loved her screaming and writhing and the terror that kept pressing her. He even saw and acknowledged the shame of her weakness when a question was asked that wasn’t even requiring an answer… such as if she enjoyed the mallet over the stiletto when used on her flesh. Most of his questions had no easy answers.

And when he finally asked her if she was weak and dirty, to disgusting to even remotely be someone he’d be proud to be seen with, she’d answered him truthfully yes… as something shattered within her.

He broke her down, built her backup, and broke her down again with an expertise that left her not even knowing her name three bells in. And then he’d started asking her questions that she couldn’t answer. She couldn’t answer them because he made up answers for her, cruel responses, crude responses, even responses that belittled her in a way that twisted her mind and made her wonder if she wasn’t answering them after all – speaking out of his mouth – with power that was slowly rising protectively in her. It waited though, uncoiling like a snake, and rising in her throat like bile.

Nico toyed with her for bells, playing with her body like a little child would play with a doll. He made free with his hands, half exploring, half caressing, then returning to punish. There wasn’t a place on her body that he left untouched, either pinching, piercing, or slapping. His favorite seemed to be painting on her form with her own blood. Those elaborate designs and whirls, even handprints, made it to his own chest as well, which somehow had gone bare in the midst of his torture.

He had an array of weapons as well, not all of which were blades. He knew how to make deep and shallow bruises, and to cause blinding pain by strikes in places Tazrae wouldn’t remotely guess would lead to such pain. Some of his instruments were sharp, but some were blunt and just as wicked. He tried them all on her, whispering how he was an artist and how beautiful the canvas of her body was. He was far more interested in beating her than anything else, and unbelievably Tazrae was grateful for that beyond belief.

He brought her to the edge of consciousness more than once, always breaking it off enough that she didn’t quite get swallowed by the blackness she craved. In that whole time, Tazrae cried, then sobbed, and even broke down and begged him to stop. He didn’t. And the begging seemed to arouse him in a way the beating hadn’t. He’d bared his entire body then, and stroked himself, openly in front of her, and promised her worse as he tried to leave his seed on her. But he couldn’t get fully hard, not in the way she’d seen men get, and in the end, he’d broken off his self-pleasuring to set into her again with his fists.

That had been a mercy in the end. Because, two blows to the head as she’d laughed at his failure, had darkened her world into blissful quiet and solitude. Nothing hurt… nothing bled… and she was free. And the odd thing was, the laughter from her throat hadn’t been hers. It was the serpent made of power that has rose within her. That same serpent swallowed her, relieving her of her consciousness.

Words: 588

Continued In: [Holiday Challenge] Stealing The Light V