She had no words for it. Only desires. Only a yearning to scream, a yearning to break free from her captor’s iron grip and lunge at him with an arm that throbbed with a pain she wanted nothing more than to share.
Those desires left her, though, along with the air in her lungs, as the netherling twisted her about, placed a palm upon her belly and slammed her gainst the wall of the round, cavernous chamber. Sense left with the wind and she scarcely even noticed her arms being raised so high above her head as to pull her to the tips of her toes. It returned, however, with the eager snapping of metal as manacles were fastened about her wrists and she was left to hang against the wall like a macabre piece of art.
Her captor stepped back, met her scowl with cold eyes and tense muscles, as if challenging Asper to give her a reason to use those gauntleted fists folded over her chest. The priestess offered nothing more than a glare. The netherling, denied, snorted and left.
Nai had more to give.
“Please no, please stop, please no, please stop,” she chanted the words, as though they would gain power the more she spoke them. “Please, please, please, please. .”
The netherling holding her took no notice of her pleas as she forced the girl into a similar set of manacles on the opposite side of the chamber’s door. Nai seemed to forget Asper was there entirely, shaking her head to add gesture to desperate incantation.
And no one seemed to notice the murals upon the walls.
They were almost illegible, smeared by soot from torches haphazardly jammed into the wall, scratched by scenes of struggle or boredom-induced violence. But Asper could make out a few images: men marching to war against towering black shapes, green, reptilian things marching beside them. Amidst them all strode great stone colossi, dressed in robes, hands outstretched.
She had seen these before, she realized: the great stone monoliths upon Teji, as imposing in paint as they were in person.
They marched into oblivion, crushing black shapes beneath their treads, sending white shapes fleeing before their authoritative palms. She followed them as they marched across the walls, displaying banners of many gods, holding weapons high. They descended toward the back of the chamber, the mural lost in the darkness that was held at bay by the torches, save for but a few strands of crimson paint that stretched out of the gloom.
She squinted to see them, to make them out.
Are those. . tentacles?
The scream that burst out of the darkness shook her back to her senses. An inhuman shrieked boiled out of the back of the cavern, echoed through her skull as it did through the chamber. She turned away, shut her eyes, instinctively tried to clasp her hands over her ears even as the chains held her tight, chiding her with a rattle of links.
They faded, eventually. She opened her eyes. The breath immediately left her once more as she stared into a pair of eyes alight with crimson fire not a foot away from her.
“How did this happen?” Sheraptus asked.
He thrust the blackened pieces upon his palm at her. It had once been a living thing, she deduced by noting the charred remains of a jointed leg, even if everything else was soot and charcoal.
She looked from the remains to him. She should have cursed at him, she knew. Spat in his face, maybe. All she could form, as his mouth twisted into an expectant frown, was a single word.
“Huh?”
“Why does this thing exist?” His voice was eerily ponderous, as though he were talking to the blackened husk and not her. “It was so small that I barely had to move my fingers, barely had to think and. .”
He turned his hand over, let the fragments fall to ashes.
“It simply turned to nothing,” he whispered. “Why?”
The fire burning in his eyes could not burn nearly hot enough to obscure the glimmer in his stare, the sort of excited flashing of a boy with a new toy right before he accidentally breaks it. It unnerved her to see it, even without the malicious red glow that strained to obscure it. But she forced herself to look. She forced herself to speak.
“Because you killed it.”
He frowned, the glimmer waning, as though he had hoped that wasn’t the case.
“Why?” he asked.
For lack of anything else, she simply stared.
Is this it? she asked herself. Is this the man that thinks he’s a god? He doesn’t even know why he kills. He’s not a god. He has. .
“Nothing.”
“What?”
She wasn’t even aware that the word had slipped out until he frowned at her. After she was, though, the rest came easily.
“You killed it because you have nothing else. You killed it because that’s what you do. You destroy. You hurt people.” She drew in a staggering breath, but the words came flooding out, impossible to stop. “Because whatever made you, they made you with nothing else but that purpose. You don’t know why, you don’t know how. You know nothing but pain, and without pain, you are nothing.”
It didn’t feel good to say it. It felt necessary, as necessary as the deep breath that came after she said it. It came into her lungs clean, despite the soot, the heat, and the suffering surrounding her. That felt good.
It would have felt better if Sheraptus hadn’t smiled broadly and spoke.
“Exactly.”
She recoiled, the very words striking her just when she thought he couldn’t say anything more depraved. He didn’t notice her reaction, he didn’t notice she was there as he turned around and made a grand, sweeping gesture.
“Created to destroy, created to kill, that makes sense,” he said to the cavern as he paced about its circular length. “Weapons need to be forged. Nethra has to be channeled. But this?” He looked down at the black, sooty smear on the floor. “What purpose is there in something so weak?”
His gaze drifted to Nai, hanging helplessly in her chains. Asper felt her bowels turn to water as though he had looked at her instead. Her feet scrabbled against the floor, the chains pulling her back, forcing her to watch helplessly as he reached out, a pair of long, probing fingers gently brushing against Nai’s cheek.
“What use is there for such a thing. .” he whispered.
The fire in his eyes smoldered, painting Nai’s face crimson. She let out a soft whimper, daring not to speak, daring not to move as his fingers drifted lower, across her throat, toward her chest.
“I DON’T KNOW!”
It wasn’t a lie. She didn’t know the answer. She didn’t know why she screamed so suddenly. And she didn’t care. Sheraptus turned away from Nai, his gaze dimming to a faint glow. Asper watched long enough to see the girl go slack in her bonds again before turning to lock her gaze upon his and his upon hers.
“No one knows,” she continued. “The Gods don’t tell us when we’re born.”
“Then why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do anything you do?” he asked. “Why call out to gods if you can’t see them, if you can’t hear them and they don’t talk to you?”
“They do. We have scriptures, prayers, hymnals, ritual. They tell us how to live, what to do,” she paused to put emphasis on her next words, “why we shouldn’t kill and-”
“Those are not gods. They do not create, they were created.”
“By the Gods.”
“How?”
“They told us-”
“Then why do they not tell you now? What do these rituals and things do but ask more questions? Where do you get answers?”
“They. . they. .” The words came slowly, like a knife being drawn out of her flesh. “They might not give us answers. The Gods might not even talk to us.” She said it aloud for the first time. “They might not even exist.”