I was ecstatic. Not just because of the fire I felt inside and the certain knowledge that I could use it to set the world ablaze, but also because it meant I could stay. Stay at the academy, stay with Josef. Relief was what made me truly happy that day, relief from the fear that had been gnawing inside of me since that first rejection. True, it was only three days, but to a child, three days is a lifetime and also passes in the blink of an eye. I admit I was less happy when Tutor Luen advanced upon me with Spiceweed once again. They had discovered my first attunement, but that didn't mean I was ready to wander around with fire at my beck and call. I can't blame them for that; untrained Sourcerers discovering magic for the first time are dangerous on an entirely different level. And only a fool gives an unsupervised six-year-old a match.
The strange thing is, not all Pyromancers feel the flame inside. It is the magic of temperature rather than fire. When Lesray Alderson was tested for it, the bitch-whore said she felt a ball of ice inside, not burning but freezing instead. Maybe that is why we were always at odds with each other, even from the start. A natural war between fire and ice. Then again, I think it far more likely it's because she's a rampant cunt.
There were, at the time, twenty-two known Sources. I had attunement to only six of them, but I was tested for all of them. I retched so hard I was vomiting blood. After the third day, the tutors stopped sending me back to the dorms and gave me my own bed in the infirmary. I remember looking in a mirror and seeing red dots all around my eyes. The physicians told me I had burst blood vessels, such was the violence of my reaction to Spiceweed. Despite it all, the testing continued. I was just six years old, torn away from my family. It felt like torture. It was torture! I cried myself to sleep every night, and every morning I woke to find Josef next to me in my infirmary bed.
Chapter 11
I awoke to pain. The coughing fit that racked my body only heightened that agony. I ached everywhere and could barely summon the energy to open my eyes. Instead, I chose to listen. And I heard nothing.
Silence down in the Pit was beyond rare. There was always noise, usually from the digging. I felt my nerves fraying, warring with the pain inside until staying still became a torture all its own. A little part of me dared to hope I was free. That somehow, I had been rescued from the hell of that place. But I felt cold rock beneath me and already I knew the false hope for what it was.
With a groan I started to shift, getting my hands underneath me. I dragged my eyelids open to see grey stone and a puddle of spittle and blood. As I rolled onto my back, I saw a single table bolted to the stone beneath it, and two chairs. I was in the overseer's interrogation room.
My head pounded like the end of a week-long drunk, an unpleasant feeling I have since come to know more than once, and my face felt stiff and swollen. I remembered Prig hitting me, the shard of mirror still embedded in his neck. I tried to smile at that, but my cheek flared with agony like fire running through my flesh. The wound still hadn't been dealt with. Raw flesh still oozing blood.
I struggled to sitting, clutching at my ribs. I'm convinced Prig or the others must have kicked me after I collapsed. It was my first time experiencing the delightful agony of a broken rib, and I was quickly learning just how debilitating it was. It took a lot of effort, and more than a few cries of pain, before I pulled myself up onto one of the chairs. There, sitting in that room, I wondered if I would ever walk properly again. I thought I was crippled from the pain.
"Fuck!" I lowered my head onto the table and cried. The pain in my ribs soon put a stop to the sobbing. I could see my right hand, blood soaked through the bandages. At least that brought a smile to my face, seeing Prig's blood on my hands. It was too much to hope he was dead, so instead I hoped I had taught the filth-licking bastard to fear me.
When the door to the interrogation cell finally opened I didn't even lift my head from the table. I listened to the footsteps as the overseer approached and slid down into the chair across from mine. I heard the door shut again, and I waited for the overseer to say his piece. I didn't have the energy for his games. All I wanted was to curl up into a ball next to Josef and sleep.
I think it was the thought of Josef that strengthened my resolve. I wasn't the only one beaten by Prig, and by stabbing the foreman I had put Josef in even greater danger. I knew there was no way Prig would have sated his anger with a single beating, bullies never do. Everything to them is an escalating series of offences and insufficient retribution. There would be more, I realised. Prig wouldn't stop until one of us was dead, probably me, and even then, he'd just pick someone new to bully. Fuckers like that were never happy unless they were tormenting someone else, as if they could make their own worthless lives better by making someone else's shit.
It took a lot of effort to raise my head and sit up straight in the chair. I look back now, and it seems like it should have been an easy thing, yet at the time it felt a heroic achievement. The overseer watched me, a curious look on his hawkish face. It was the first time I truly felt like a prisoner. I was in rags held together by filth and hope, and bleeding from a dozen different places; and bruised everywhere else. The overseer was in a pristine military uniform. I knew then what he was about to offer me.
"I can make it all stop," he said.
I have to hand it to the fucker, he knew what he was doing. If he had offered me the deal any earlier I would have scoffed and it would have strengthened my resolve, but he waited until I was at my lowest. He waited until I was beaten and bloody, until the only other person I really cared about was in a similar condition. Worst of all was that I knew Prig wasn't going to stop; if anything, he would only get worse from here on out. More vindictive. More brutal. The overseer was the only one who could stop it. He knew it. And I knew it. By all the pox-ridden whore-faced fucks, he had won and we both knew it. He didn't even have the good grace to look smug about it.
"Perhaps you still think some of vestige of the Orran empire will be coming to rescue you?" The overseer paused and shook his head. "There is no Orran empire. The entire Orran bloodline has been wiped out. Your emperor is dead. He died before your armies even laid down their arms."
Truth is a flood, waters rising while we hide inside homes of self-deception. There is a point where water starts gushing in under the door, through the cracks in the windows. You cannot hide from the truth, nor barricade against it. You can only run from it, and I had nowhere to run. It made sense. I'd always wondered why the Orran army had surrendered. We could have fought on. I could have fought on. But the call to lay down arms was given, and now the overseer was telling me why. I knew it for the truth. The doors burst open, the windows cracked, and the water flooded in. And I drowned in the truth.
That was the moment I felt something snap inside. Hope shattered and all I could do was stare at the pieces with no concept of how to put them back together again. At that point I could see my future laid out in front of me. I could read it in the broken bones I would suffer and the scars my flesh would form. How long before Prig took one of the beatings too far? How long before he did something to me or Josef that wouldn't heal? What if he had already?
And the overseer was offering to take me away from it all. I had no hope of rescue from the people who had raised me and trained me. The empire I had sworn to serve was gone. But the overseer was the rescue I had been waiting for. He was the answer. He who had only ever asked me questions. He'd tried to help me, offering me food and fresh clothing. I looked up to find him nodding at me, a genuinely concerned look on his face.