Ashyn felt himself floating. It was an all too familiar feeling as his body drifted like a feather, weightless and in nothingness. She knew! She knew he feared the whip, but how? How was it possible for her to know so much! Then he realized where he was. The same recurring dreamlike sensation he had every time he was near death. The place the Exemplar brought him.
He opened his eyes, and there she was before him. Platinum hair and swirling eyes.
“It is you,” he said in shock, recognizing the Exemplar that was in the council chambers with him where he was being tortured. “You have betrayed me,” he spat, surprised at the venom of his words. “You told her, didn’t you?” He continued, “Told her my fears.”
The Exemplar before him cocked her head to the side like a confused animal. “How would I know your fears, until before I looked into your eyes?”
Ashyn slammed the palm of his hand to his head, “because you are in here. You seem to always be in here!”
Her large silver eyes blinked at him, and then looked around. “You have been here before? You manifested this?”
Flabbergasted, at the elf Ashyn yelled, “Yes! Twice at least, I’ve been here. And no, you made this, not me!”
She eyed him suspiciously, “You will do as I say.”
Ashyn suddenly felt himself drawn to her. A strange allure that he found impossible to resist. “What. Are. You. Doing?” he growled, as he took a step towards the Exemplar through the fog.
Ashyn’s head clouded, and he felt himself growing lighter once more, his control on his own mind slipping. “Stop this!”
“You resist me?” the Exemplar said incredulously.
Ashyn fought to direct his gaze somewhere else, anywhere else. The cords in his neck bulged as he strained against his own body. Finally, his vision shifted half an inch to her shoulder. Instantly his feet slammed to the ground and he grew dizzy.
“How did you…” the Exemplar trailed off. He felt her eyes searching his body, and then involuntarily he raised his own arm. The arm with the platinum braid on it. “Where did you get this?” she demanded.
Oh shit, Ashyn realized. A thought of both Xexial’s words and the Exemplar’s rolled through his head. The Exemplar warned him. Their actions carried repercussions and they needed to be careful. That was why she didn’t allow him to see her.
Xexial warned him that the Ferhym have Exemplars more often than any other Elves, and that it wasn’t uncommon that they have two in a single generation. Ashyn assumed because she had platinum hair and eyes that it was the same person, but it wasn’t. This wasn’t his Exemplar. It was another one.
As this epiphany dawned on him, he could see now that her features didn’t exactly match those of the child he had met.
Ashyn changed tactics fast. “How did she know?” he countered, challenging the Exemplar’s question with his own. “How did Brodea know I would fear the whip?”
The Exemplar shook her head. “I do not know. The First Councilor is extremely resourceful.”
“And you are helping her.” His voice hissed disdainfully.
Ashyn’s personal control within this bizarre dream state seemed to unnerve the platinum-haired beauty. She took a step backward. “I am Ferhym. I serve the Council of Elm. You are a skewer and the dui Nuchada! Your words are poison.”
“Why are we here?”
The Exemplar blinked at him several times, clearly dumbfounded. “You are going to serve me. You are going to read the tome.”
Ashyn shook his head, his strength gaining. “No. I serve no one.”.
The Exemplar’s voice quavered, “This is not possible. You will serve me!”
Again he felt a powerful allure to do as she bid. When he resisted her, it was like his head was being slammed repeatedly with a war-hammer. She could control him without making eye contact, he thought.
Then he remembered that the eye contact was already made. This was a fight inside his mind. He lost the first battle; he refused to lose the second.
His eyes searched for anything that could distract him from the powerful Exemplar. After a moment they fell on the dangling silver braid hanging from his wrist. Almost immediately, he felt the powers ebb.
Ashyn stood to his full height. He was suddenly towering over the Exemplar. At this moment she looked incredibly young. Like a child. She looked up at him terrified.
“Tell your First Councilor the answer is still no.”
His strength regained he slammed his hands together and the dream dissolved.
~ ~ ~
The Exemplar screamed and fell away from Ashyn. The young wizard gasped as his body was once again flooded with a stinging pain.
His eyes burned and watered, but he saw the Exemplar huddled over on the hardwood floor. She was crying. Immediately, Brodea was there, hunched over the Exemplar.
The silver-eyed elf cried, “He’s a monster. He resisted me. What does it mean?”
Brodea looked back at Ashyn, her eyes blazing, “It means we have to break the skewer even harder.”
The Exemplar spat angrily. “He’s already broken. To the magic. I saw it.”
Ashyn stared at the Exemplar in disbelief. How could she have seen it? How did she know?
“Really?” Brodea asked.
The Exemplar nodded, “Something has caused his connection to weaken. It only comes sporadically now. Like water lapping a shore, occasionally it creeps up far enough that it brushes his feet.”
Brodea stood up slowly and faced the druid. “Is such a thing possible?”
The druid looked from Ashyn back to the First Councilor. “It is, and it would explain much. Like how Hunter Jenhiro was able to defeat him.”
“Indeed.” Ashyn watched Brodea’s reaction. A smile crept on the corners of her lips. “In that case, bring me Whísper. It’s time we fueled this interrogation with a little raw emotion.”
Brodea’s cold, dark eyes fell on Ashyn, “You will wish you had complied, dui Nuchada. What I have done to you is only a pittance to what Whísper shall do. By the time this night is over, I doubt you’ll even remember how to pronounce your own name.”
~ ~ ~
Hours passed and only one thing filled Ashyn’s mind. Pain. She was right. Everything grew foggy under the endless waves of torment. He forgot her name, he almost forgot his own.
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 in his life. It was excruciating, terrifying, and every moment he was without it felt like a reprieve, but also felt hollow.
“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 and permeated his scent and his lips with a heavy copper tinge. 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 was 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 swayed before him, waving the cruel tip of a broken spear in front of him. Its normally silver sheen glowed an orangish-white. She just finished pressing it against the coals.
She hissed, “Time to seal up those wounds, dui Nuchada.”
“Don’t blind him,” the song-like voice chimed behind 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.