Ash slowly became aware of the dank stone walls that surrounded him, unaware he was dreaming. It seemed so real and once had been. Despair swamped him as memory dragged him down into shadows and darkness. Heavy iron chains weighed on his wrists, his ankles. They chafed the skin until there was nothing but open sores beneath them. Once he’d counted the days but he no longer knew how long they’d held him. Day and night meant nothing down here, but certainly it had been months if not longer. It seemed like forever.
The walls of his prison glistened with moisture, the air was damp and fetid, the straw on the floor thick with crawling vermin while mice and rats skittered along the walls. The stench, a mixture of the foul damp straw, rat droppings and his own excrement, was stifling.
His shoulders burned from carrying his weight, from being held in the same fixed position for so long.
In that moment, the realization crashed over him and he nearly broke.
A dream, it had only been a dream, nothing but a delusion. All of it, his memories of freedom, of a woman with hair like flame and eyes like the morning mists, had all been a dream. He wanted to cry out in denial, but dared not.
The iron on his wrists and ankles made them ache nearly constantly and the lashes on his back burned like fire but pain had been a constant in his life since they’d summoned him to this terrible place with one of their spells. One moment he’d been in his chambers on the ethereal plane, the next here.
Then they’d closed the iron on him.
Within it, he was trapped, imprisoned, and at their mercy.
And so he remained.
Now he knew what had happened to his absent brothers, the others who’d simply disappeared, although they’d searched for them.
He grieved for Seir and the others if this was what they’d faced, what they’d suffered. Alone.
A soft, familiar voice called to him.
You’re not alone. Ash, you’re not
.
It was a lie. For months, for more than a year he’d yearned for a friendly voice.
There had only been the priests with their implements of torture.
If he listened to that voice, he’d lose his mind. Go truly and completely mad.
Hope was a dangerous thing in this place. Necessary but dangerous.
Ash closed off that tantalizing voice, shut it out.
His hunger was constant, a raging thirst that couldn’t be quenched, not here, not the way his hunger should be fed.
He longed for a glimmer of sunlight in these dark depths, a glimpse of the blue sky where once he’d flown high above the earth. Even, he considered ruefully and longingly, for the harsh glare of that other plane as it fell over the red escarpments where his brothers made their chambers. He longed for that ruddy sky tinted with yellow by the endlessly blowing sand, as sere as it was, as much as he’d complained of it. For there he’d been free.
He longed for his brothers, the people he’d loved, his slaughtered mother, the friends who’d died and the ones who still lived.
At least Asmodeus and the others were still safe, free, Ash had no company in this terrible place. Nor would he if he could help it.
Shackled to the wall with too little chain to allow him to either sit or lie down, he was forced to hang in the chains even to sleep. His wings were chafed by the wall behind him as he couldn’t fold them tightly enough to keep them away from the coarse stone or extend them enough to ease their stiffness. Exhaustion dogged him constantly, it dulled his senses. He would have chosen death easily over this unending torment.
So long as he remained in the hands of the priests, it wasn’t his choice.
At the sound of iron scraping on stone Ash fought an involuntary shudder.
Nor was this, whatever was to come.
The priests, those black crows, had come to pick at his bones again.
As soon as he saw what they’d brought with them he shifted to human form, something not even the iron on his wrists could prevent, whatever the magical cost to him, however much more deeply the hunger dug its claws into him. It was an effort to change into a form that wouldn’t terrify the poor child who’d never seen his kind, where once Daemonae had been plentiful. And welcome.
It was a price he was more than willing to pay. He wouldn’t be the subject of more torment. Nor would he cause it. They couldn’t know the child they offered would give him nothing, no sustenance at all, nor would they believe him if he’d told them.
He already had, many times.
They wanted proof of his ‘barbaric’ nature, not knowing the meaning of what his people did with the women they cared for or the ones they loved, their true mates. Although he didn’t have a mate himself, with any human it was so much more than feeding, more than just the drinking their blood, their essence, but a true joining of souls, not just bodies. Any food could sustain, as most of these priests could attest with their daily ration of thin gruel, but drinking the essence of one’s mate to make them one with each other was a true sharing.
Remembering the village where he’d grown up, his mother and the deep love she’d shown for his father, he grieved. That was gone now. As was all hope of sharing a love like theirs.
Ash fought the ancient sorrow and his hatred of these who tormented him, knowing the glow of his eyes would betray him, paint him in the eyes of the child as exactly what the priests declared him to be.
Demon.
Not Daemonae, but a lesser thing, a creature condemned.
He didn’t try to speak with the child, to reassure him. He knew the priests would twist his words, pervert them and his intent to imply he intended to entice and therefore damn the child’s soul.
Instead he turned his back on them.
They took the child away.
Despair was as great a weight on him as the iron chains when the priests returned and dragged him from the cell to their instruments of torture.
Today it would be the frame, a form not unlike the rack but upright.
Ash closed his eyes and resigned himself to it. He locked his jaw and fought the weakness, the nearly overpowering desire to tell them anything if only to make the pain stop.
If he faltered, if he gave in, it would – but only for him. It would begin for another. For whomever he betrayed. He wouldn’t. He held to that, clung to it.
Deliberately drawing out the process, they strapped him into place, removing one set of manacles to replace them with another. The chains clanked as the great wheels turned, drew him up to suspend him within the contraption.
At least in human form his wings and tail were safe from them.
Even so his body, all Daemonae bodies, were much more resilient than those of humans, they tolerated far greater abuse. It was clear the priests had learned much from those who’d gone before him.
Gritting his teeth, he felt the frame invert, force him upside down. If he died like this to their minds, his soul would go to hell.
Ash was certain he was already there.
His people had different beliefs – that they were all a part of the creative/destructive force that was being – and that gave these yet another reason to condemn him.
They wanted him to call out to their God for forgiveness, for mercy. If he’d thought it would work, he would have.
They brought out the instruments of torture, laid them before him, the whips and the chains, the hot irons, so he could look on them and anticipate what was to come.
The pain started, the torments, as they demanded he repent his ‘evil’ ways, as if it were a choice. He couldn’t be other than what he was.
Fire seared across his back as the lash struck.
Ash fought to set himself apart from the pain, to separate himself from it and bear it. Agony ripped through his flesh, burned across it, the scent of his own flesh roasting made him gag. Blood and sweat ran down his body. He almost succeeded in setting it all aside until he felt warm blood that wasn’t his own drip onto his mouth.
His hunger awoke instantly, raging. Almost, almost, he gave in to it, battening onto that soft warm flesh, that flickering essence, until he opened his eyes and saw what they’d done.
Bound and gagged, the helpless woman looked at him as she tried to struggle. Her eyes rolled as wildly as a sheep’s to the slaughter. She was dressed like a whore. Her wrist was slit. He dared not feed from her or confirm their belief of him. He dared not even lick his lips or risk losing all control.
The sound of her blood pattering on the stone floor was the sound of rain on a rooftop, a sweet torment as the coppery scent of it filled the air.
A waste of life. Yet they called
him monster…
Fury and hopelessness exploded through him. He wanted to kill them all, to rip them apart with his bare hands. He raged against the chains, goaded by his hunger, every bit of his Daemonic self visible in his fury, his rage and pain, his utter despair evident as he cried out to the Gods for relief.
A voice called to him, familiar, known.
In his anguish, still caught in the depths of desolation and fury, he exploded out of the dream and into the darkness of the cottage. The familiar and the known were surreal against the memory of pain and horror. He stood, shuddering, his mind reeling between this place and that one.
Miri went to him, Ash’s tension, his pain, tearing through her. It had been horrible to watch the dream torment him.
Frantic, she’d been unable to break him from the grip of the nightmare or whatever it was that held him, no matter how or what she tried.
Gentle stroking, calling his name, none of it worked. Not until she shouted for him mentally, trying desperately to break the hold the dream had on him.
The expression on his face was tormented and furious. Every limb was rigid, his sharp-boned features a harsh, indifferent mask. His eyes glowed fiercely as color raced beneath his skin.
Reaching out, she laid a hand on his chest.
“Ash?”
That touch jolted him completely awake to flickering candlelit darkness.
Dazed, Ash jerked from her, pushed her away. She wasn’t real. Couldn’t be real. This was just another dream, like so many he’d had all those long ages ago.
His muscles jumped, every nerve alight with remembered pain. He shuddered as he fought the rage, the fury, the pain and the horror. And the savage hunger that was roused in him by the dream, by the memory of spilled blood, by the remembered scent of it. That alone was a torment. Fear clamored.
“Don’t touch me,” he snarled, still unsure where he was, knowing in some part of his mind that wasn’t still in the dream who Miri was, what she was to him, but the nightmare had its claws sunk deep.
They’d burned and beaten him like a dog, tortured and tormented him, treated him as if he were a thing until he’d felt like one. He felt…unclean, somehow, tainted. Unworthy.
His rage was so close to the surface, seeking to lash out at something, anything, to strike back at those who’d tortured and tormented him. Men, priests, humans. It burned inside him.
Ash didn’t want that to touch her, to touch Miri. He was terrified of what he might do, of what he would do. Of what he was capable of doing.
The fierce look Ash shot her stung Miri sharply. Her heart twisted.
His lambent golden eyes glowed brilliantly, red sparks danced wildly within them. His fury turned his face savage and cruel. That fierce, intimidating visage would have quailed even some among his brothers had he but known it.