Pain. Pain surged through his body like lightning. It moved from his eyes, through his skull, down his spine, and escaped through the tips of his fingers and toes. It cut a swath through him that left him drained like never before. It was excruciating, terrifying, and every moment he was without it felt like a hollow reprieve.
“Don’t cut out his eyes; we need them,” a voice said before him. Under normal circumstances, he would have thought the voice sultry, even beautiful. There was a certain cadence to her words, an almost song-like quality to the way she spoke. But now, in the haze of despair, her words were terror.
Hot liquid ran down his face. It mingled with the salt of his sweat, filling his nostrils with its heavy copper tinge and leaving its taste on his lips. It was blood, his blood.
The elf lingered before him. A distant memory had stirred when he first saw her. She smiled wickedly at him with dark eyes like chips of obsidian. The right side of her face was a mask of thick, pink scar tissue. From the ruined pointed tip of her ear down to the slender curve of her neck was a bubbly mass of rippled and swollen flesh. She had been beautiful once. He took that from her long ago, having destroyed their trap in a maelstrom of fire. She had been the only elf to survive, that he knew of.
Now she danced before him, waving the cruel tip of a broken spear in front of him. Its normally silver sheen glowed an orange-white. She had just finished pressing it against the coals.
“Time to seal up those wounds, dui Nuchada,” she hissed.
The musical voice chimed behind him, “Don’t blind him.”
With her dark eyes never leaving his, her disappointment cut through her reply, “I won’t.” She moved against him, her body firm against his bound flesh. “I will take my time with you. I will hurt you, break you, and make you long for the death you deserve, skewer.”
Her face close to his, she whispered to him, “I will make you suffer, as I have suffered. I will put you through all the pain that I have been through and more. When I am done, and my mother has all that she needs from you, I will then relish in the kill. I will burn your eyes out from your wretched skull and then I shall cut off your head for all the other vermin to see. You are a Skewer of Balance, and I will have my vengeance for what you have done to my Shedalia.”
She reached back and yanked his hair so he couldn’t pull away from her. Tension rising in his chest, he watched as she slowly lowered the burning blade. He felt its searing heat inches from his lacerated skin. With the twisted smile of someone in complete control, she pushed the flat of the spear against his torn face. His skin broiled and his blood bubbled. He could smell the fetid odor of his own burnt flesh as acrid steam roiled from his face. Unable to resist the unbelievable torment that quaked through his body, Ashyn Rune screamed.
He knew that was only the beginning.