CHAPTER TWELVE - DESCENT

What came thereafter was never fully clear to her.

There were black caverns, chains of hell-forged steel. And others around her, not the Hive, but other Guardians. She could not have said who.

Her senses functioned after a sort, but her mind was clouded. Things came in snatches, moments, all framed in heady oblivion.

Standing now, amongst others. Green flames lick the walls, lighting everything in pale radiance. Guardians stand to either side of her, stripped of their armor. An acolyte walks down the line, prods them with clawed fingers.

It stops, dead eyes on her. Warbles something to another. She can almost understand it. It had said-

But as quickly as they came, they would fade, and darkness would swallow her whole.

Darkness.

Until her mind cleared once more, for a few brief heartbeats.

She was eating, swallowing whole a gruesome worm they had given her. It squirmed in her throat and she gagged, water streaming from her eyes.

Vague shapes moving before her, resolving from obscurity. A wizard and its attendants. Its rank breath in her ear, words of such terrible weight that she doubled in pain. She forgot them as soon as they had been said.

Then chains again, burning cold on her bare arms, heavier than a neutron star. They leached away her strength, her life, her Light. Chained to a spike of metal. A prisoner.

Finally, after an eternity of limbo, her mind snapped back into place.

Two acolytes held her fast by the shoulders, chattering to eachother. A third brought forward plates of armor, held them up to her. A fitting. One seized her chin, tilted her head towards the light. It screeched something, prodding her chest.

Another entered the room, something like an ovipositor gleaming in its claws.

Amanda bolted forward. Her jailers were surprised, and she broke free of them.

They cried out, rushing her. Freezing claws were on her, tearing skin she realized was bare. They were trying to bring her down to the floor.

She was weak, her Light faint, but she was still a Guardian.

She threw them aside, bearing one to the ground and seizing the weapon from its hip. Useless in human hands, but still heavy. She stove in its kull with the piece of iron.

Turning, the others had their weapons out, crackling with void fire. The last, holding the ovipositor in its hands, held back. She could see something in the instrument, moving.

They stared eachother down across the room for a moment, before Amanda darted forward, flying barefoot across the floor.

She was too slow. A bolt of energy tore past, scorching her ribs. The Guardian crashed to the floor, crying out in pain. Her side was cracked and blackened. No armor, just pale flesh.

They were on her in a flash, four strong arms holding her down. Her face was pressed against the floor, pinned by a four-clawed hand.

Then something sharp pierced her neck, and the world fell away.

More time passed, time and endless darkness. Being dragged through twisted passageways, past altars where Guardians languished, barely alive.

A long time spent in a pitch black cell, so small she could barely stand. Maybe hours, maybe months.

All the while, Amanda felt wrong. She would touch her neck, and the skin around where they had injected her would be hot and itchy. She would scratch it, and skin would peel away.

She would wretch, often, on all fours in her tiny cell, back heaving until she thought there could be no fluid left in her body. They had done something to her.

Then they would come and leave a dish of those awful worms, writhing in mucous. She tried to eat them, but after a time no longer had the will.

So they began to force-feed her, holding her while she thrashed weakly. They were keeping her alive for something.

The rash on her neck spread, until her whole body crawled with fire ants and she had scraped away every inch of skin. She felt wrong.

Sometimes she tried to talk to herself, anything to hear a human voice in this prison. Sometimes she would open her mouth to speak, and Hive words would spill out.

When it happened, she would try to stop and find herself unable. Once the flow of alien speech began it could not be halted. When her efforts to stop were fiercest, she would laugh at herself in a strange, chittering manner.

Amanda stopped talking to herself.

One day (hour? minute? week? month? year?) she felt it moving underneath her skin. At first, she thought she was mad. Hoped she was. Prayed.

She pressed her fingers to her throat. She shut her eyes to the dark and waited, feeling for a heartbeat.

Two pulses.

Amanda screamed until her throat was raw.

When they came to feed her again, they found her lying in a pool of blood. Hers, and something else's.

She had broken her leg, badly, a compound fracture. Ragged bone jutted from her calf. A sliver of it was still in her hand, a crude scalpel, used to excise a tumor.

That tumor had fought.

When she had cut into her neck with that shard of herself, it had pressed itself up against her throat to try and escape.

When she had pinned it with her makeshift knife, it wrapped itself around her esophagus. If I go, you go. Amanda was sure she had heard it say that.

When she had torn it screaming (it or her?) from her neck, it had snapped at her with half-formed jaws and spat acid in her eyes.

Now it lay crushed in their blood. Tendrils like roots spilled from it, tendrils that had twined themselves with her nerves and hijacked her brain.

Her guards, inhuman as they were, seemed struck by this.

They moved her after that, after she had ripped their child from her neck and killed it.

She was blind and broken, but doubted she would remain that way for long. They were trying to break her, or use her, something. They wouldn't let her die. They would set the bones and fill her up with blood and give her back her sight.

Amanda knew that they would not let the torture end.

She was nursed back to health by the tender ministrations of a wizard.

It sang to her a melancholic lullaby, crooning and preening, cupping her jaw in its talons, stroking her face, before it saw the extent of her injuries.

The wizard clawed Amanda's neck, searching, opening her wounds back up to find what was no longer there.

She grinned through blood and bile. Whatever they had tried to do to her, she'd stopped it. The wizard would see. Then it would kill her, and she could escape this nightmare. Being a Guardian meant knowing you would die one day, and accepting that.

But then Amanda's smile fell.

The wizard wailed, heart-rending and inconsolable, a piercing cry that stopped time. And in its cry was something old and deep and human. Something that grabbed Amanda's heart and squeezed down on it.

She heard in the wizard's cry that same crushing tide that had borne down on her when Cass had died.

This was the sound of a mother who had lost her child.

Amanda bit back tears. The Guardian screamed, raging against the restraints that held it, against the weakness of its other half. Amanda began to weep, eyes watering. The Guardian gritted its jaw and held its tongue, refusing to give voice to its humanity. Amanda's face melted into sobs. The Guardian beat at itself, refusing, refusing.

Then Amanda and the Guardian and the wizard, all three, howled for what had been taken from them.

Finally she was taken to another cell.

A guard at either shoulder, a third behind her, the barrel of its gun pressed against her back.

Going down a long hallway carved from the lunar rock, they stopped before a door.

On a spoken command from one of her jailers, it slid open, a crack in the stone yawning to reveal a wide chamber.

Braziers of sickly green flame lit the room's black walls, making them shine like oil.

Huddled in the corners, bound with chains that did not gleam despite the light, where vague shapes.

Other prisoners, she thought as she was pushed into the room.

Other Guardians.

The shapes, as one, turned their heads to look at her with blind eyes.

One spoke in a wavering voice.

"Amanda?", asked Banshee-44.

Well, there we go! Sorry that took so long...unfortunately, I wouldn't expect updates to get any faster for a while. I've got two (yes two) weddings to go to this weekend, and I've got a play coming up next week. Hope you're enjoying it so far!