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When Lucretia pulls herself awake through the never-ending depths, it is dark. The floor is cool and smooth under her bare feet and the air is perfectly still. Her instinct is to scream. When she remembers, she refuses to give them the satisfaction.
She takes an inventory of what she has lost and is surprised to find that her only lasting sacrifice has been the two decades she wagered an eternity ago. She channels an experimental flash of magic, an attempt to illuminate her surroundings that is quickly proven futile. So. She failed again.
As soon as the thought crosses her mind the blackness closes in even closer. She is wreathed in smoke, more solid than before. She tips her head back on instinct, to no avail. The smoke laps at her chin and her lips, wrenched tight against the onslaught, and it trails into her nostrils and burns at her eyes and she knows that she cannot keep herself from breathing forever.
It feels like an eternity, but they are patient creatures. The liquid smoke will wait for her and it will kill her. Of this, she is sure.
Lucretia counts. After eighty-seven seconds she gasps, and her vision bursts white. She surges in panic, trying to kick, to flail, to raise her head above the water level that isn’t there. The smoke whispers into her lungs, her whole body screams for air, and each breath she tries to take makes it worse.
The last thing she hears before she sinks back into merciful dark is a disapproving, mocking voice.
“You have disappointed us, Lucretia.”
She awakens against her will, dragged into consciousness still stoic and silent.
“Lucretia, would you like to play a game with us?” The mocking male voice echoes through the room, as it takes shape before her eyes.
She stands, defiant. She has no choice, no magic, no way out but through.
“We’re going to have so much fun!” the woman’s voice squeals.
A large wheel faces Lucretia, covered in glyphs that will seal her fate. She steps up on the dais, solidified out of amorphous smoke, and she spins. The wheel creaks to a stop on a puzzle piece, and the liches’ ebullient laughter echoes around her, worming itself into her head and spinning her off-kilter.
“A wonderful choice! Are you ready to play with us?”
Lucretia remains tight-lipped. They will eke out more than their share of her suffering. As she stands, still proud, still defiant in body if not in word, dark figures begin to materialize in her periphery. She is rooted to where she stands. She waits.
The first blow would have knocked her over, but she is paralyzed now, ice rushing up from her feet to keep her still, a stationary target for the hordes that she can barely make out.
She smells it before she sees it and long before she understands - savory and acrid, and when she realizes that these creatures all hold searing weapons in their appendages it is too late. A rush of white-hot blistering pain fills her legs and she forces her head down to see her skin being ripped from her legs and flung away, hot knives melting through the animal fat that sits beneath dark skin and coral sinew.
She screams, wreathing herself in the thick black smoke that she detests. She retches. Nothing comes up. She screams again, feels the sensitive skin on the back of her thighs split and peeled and torn away. The creatures dig their claws into the fatty tissue, pulling and separating glistening fat from dark muscle more easily than she thought possible.
The creatures climb on her, on each other, eager to reach untouched skin. She is deaf to her own screams, echoing endlessly and sending smoke careening into the monsters, visibly strengthening them. They pull her prone. She cannot resist.
The pain has become a thrum that sets her body alight. She expects the sharp tang of blood or the dark smell of viscera but she is met only with the scent of seared flesh and burning fat. She can no longer retch. She watches from above her body - corpse - as the creatures finish their ghoulish work, her face a nonhuman rictus of muscle and comical eyes and bared teeth.
The creatures dissipate back into smoke. Lucretia’s body heaves one last time.
“Again,” the voice echoes, and damns her.
The first thing she notices is that it is bright behind her eyelids. Her eyes try to adjust and are met only with more and more sparkling light. She lurches forward, the ground wavering and uneven, the same pulsing brightness that presses in on her from every direction.
“Now, now, Lucretia, be more careful! You wouldn’t want to get hurt, now would you?” The lich’s voice is saccharine, sing-song, followed by a tinkling discordant laugh.
She gasps and stumbles, struggling to keep her footing. She feels pursued. There is nothing behind her. It is silent, too silent, her feet make no noise as she runs and runs and runs across the quicksand floor, and all she hears is the drumbeat of her heart and the rush of blood inside her ears.
She runs, ragged, breath and heartbeat pulsing black smoke that wreaths her head and trails behind her, disappearing before she can track her progress across this endless terrain. When she falters it is inevitable, and one mistake begets another, and another, and another, and she is prone.
An invisible weight begins to sink onto her chest. She labors to breathe under the relentless pull of gravity. One rib cracks, then two, then her sternum, and breathing is agony but she has no choice but to breathe, even when a rib tears through the skin above it, releasing a puff of inky smoke into the ground beneath her.
A vertebra cracks, then another, and she can’t feel anymore, and soon enough, the light gives way.
Lucretia turns the heavy envelope over, running a finger along the delicate gold filigree that decorates every square inch. She slits a fingernail under the flap and opens it gently, careful not to tear it. When she pulls the flyer out she looks it over with a discerning eye, taking in the horrendous graphic design, ugly fonts and worse colors, urging her to visit the Felicity Wilds.
She should toss it out. It’s clearly junk mail, but something stays her hand. She turns the flyer over, not sure what to be afraid of, but afraid nonetheless. The envelope thunks to the floor, corner crumpled in. The flyer flutters slowly after it. Lucretia cannot suppress the noise that tears from her throat.
The Animus Bell,
she reads.
Barry,
she thinks, and she stops herself. She has so much work to do.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
When she awakes, anew, on the floor in a puddle of light barely holding against the darkness, Lucretia screams in futile frustration, smoke billowing from her mouth and settling at her feet, a heavy portent licking cold flames up her legs.
“Again,” a voice says, familiar, twisting her inside with a knife’s edge of guilt.
“Lup?” Lucretia asks. “What are you -”
The words die on her tongue, replaced by thick black smoke that threatens to suffocate her, again.
A woman steps out of the shadow that makes up this ever-changing room, just as Lucretia left her, only a glint of unreality in her eyes betraying her.
“Guilty.”
Her words hang thick in the air with finality.
“Turning you to stone would be….too kind, I think.”
Lucretia is frozen solid regardless, a rush of memories overwhelming her, and she knows what has to come next.
She can’t - won’t - flinch.
The simulacrum - Lup, she wants her to be real, can’t believe she’s real, knows she deserves her to be real
here
- snaps her fingers, dancing a flame into her palm.
“Selfish.” She takes a step towards Lucretia who can’t help but let the beginnings of a sob escape her.
She pauses. Cocks her head. Lucretia tries to mirror her and can’t, tries to lift a hand and gets nothing. Her breath quickens, drenched in panic, her eyes rove, six tiny muscles all she has to effect an escape.
“You - you feel
sorry
for yourself, don’t you?” this Lup snarls, more inhuman now. Her nostrils flare. Every muscle in Lucretia’s back seizes at once, and she topples backwards, feeling bones at their breaking point, sensing her face, spasming too, drawn into a parody of a smile.
“You’re not just unforgivable. You
knew
what you were doing, and you think you can atone for your sins? No amount of
this
can redeem you, but you’re damned to try, aren’t you? Because you still think you can be
saved
-” She hisses the last word into a sheet of fire that bubbles itself into existence under Lucretia’s skin, knives on every nerve ending until she can’t take it anymore and beyond. “This won’t save you. Nothing will.”
Lucretia breathes, gasping, the skin stretched over each muscle melting, sloughing off in great sheets under the involuntary movements, the raw muscle underneath singed but intact, fasciculating wildly.
“You betrayed us.”
“
Yes
,” Lucretia gasps.
“Ironic, but inevitable, I suppose - hubris radiates off you, darling. You got taken in, just like the rest of them.”
Lucretia’s eyes are wild with fear, seeking something that can’t exist to quell her pain. “Please,” she whispers, desperate.
Lup stalks around her rigored body, runs the dull side of a delicate conjured silver knife down the delicate slips of muscle in her neck, a twisted mirror of a familiar gesture.
“I don’t think so,” she murmurs, turning away. “You don’t deserve it.” She melts back into the shadows, leaving Lucretia alone with the unbidden memory of a cave on a long-ago world, where Lup cradled her head as the fire of poison burned through her veins, offering the quick mercy of a knife.
She relives the memory a hundred times as the cruelly impermanent death of this place takes its honey-sweet time.
For the first - but not last - time, death is not a relief.