Mortal Magic: Broken

They left me in the cell for hours, alone with my thought and the screams of pleasure and agony mixed together to keep me company. This was nothing new to me though, I was immune to the touch of this despair they were trying to inflict to me. The time when I was crying in the corner of my cell begging for all this to end was long gone. That person died years ago and all that remains now is the shadow of an insensitive man that realized he could do nothing to prevent his fate. My fate was to die someplace like this, alone and broken, though I was far from broken yet.

I could hear as the guards were coming to take prisoners for the arena and most of them were begging to not be taken or not be the next. Little did they know that while they did that the more chances they had of being selected. It was like they had this principal that demanded the most scared and broken to be taken to slaughter like sheep or pigs, while the real pigs watched and laughed and had their perverted fun.

I had no way to tell the time as the whole place had no windows and arenas where crowded all day long and most of the night too. Without the sun or the moon shining through a hole in the cell I had no way of knowing, and this place was illuminated by torches on the walls every few meters. The bars were even sturdier than the ones on Redgard and the stone walls were twice as thick. And here we were locked in our cells all the time until we were summoned to kill or die a bloody, gruesome and painful death. Sure I had made peace with death long ago but that was after I had rescued Ashe, and since I could see no escape from this place that didn’t involve me dying I was anxious all the time.

My headaches were more frequent and stronger too, like my head was determined to blow up and stain the walls with my blood. The only reprieve I found from it was when I was sleeping and that took more time effort and pain than I was used to. It was driving me crazy. And while I was looking at the cup of water I had in my cell I saw that my hair had actually grown more silver over the almost two days I thought I was in here. Now there was a big silver patch of silver hair that covered almost half the front right side of my head and soon I feared every black strand of hair would turn silver if I lived long enough for it to happen. I feared because I did not know what that change ultimately entailed.

I was sitting with my back on the left wall when I heard the guards coming again for the next person to take above. I was expecting them to come sooner or later and many of the prisoners began crying again louder and praying for their lives. This time though I heard them dragging someone with them, another poor soul doomed to get lost in the shadows of despair and this place fed to it. The prisoner was screaming that he was innocent but no one was going to believe him. No one cared for his pleas of innocence because they had already decided that he deserved to die and the people needed entertainment. And there I was years ago wandering why I had suddenly lost faith in humanity. Now the answer was clear to me once more. It was because humanity was a monster at best. Yes there might be people who were kind but under the right conditions they too would snap and become monsters; just like I did.

While I was lost in my thoughts I heard the guards coming closer and that was when to door to my cell opened. Inside came two of the men that had captured me and their smiles were almost bigger than their faces. They came closer and one of them closed the door behind him and I knew that it wasn’t what I thought at first. They weren’t here to take me to the arena, they were here to beat me up, and maybe later take me away. I wasn’t going to resist them, I was too weak to do anything at all to escape since they had starved me those two days and I only got the water so that I would live a bit longer.

The one closer to me, that now that I was right on my mind observed properly, grabbed me from the shirt and raised me up. He was wearing the same uniform of the magi guard and his skin was light toned and his hair was blonde. His face had a kind of square shape and he looked old even though his green eyes were full of life themselves. He was looking me straight in the eye and his smile got a lot darker than before as his companion came closer too. He was a spitting image of him and except that he was younger and less masculine. They had to be father and son if not at least brothers. And he had the same smirk as the older man still holding me to my feet. Here I was thinking that people were monsters and then they come and prove me right.

That was when I felt the pain in my gut from the punch I was given before I even knew it. The hit was strong and it had me bending my body from the nauseating feeling mixed with the pain that started to fade quickly. After that one punch the man straightened me up again and this time the younger one punched, not my stomach but my sides. This continued for a while as they focused on the upper part of my body and they made sure that they weren’t pulling their punches. Minutes later I was trying to breathe correctly and then the man let me fall down to the floor. My hands immediately came to my stomach which had suffered the most up until now and I still kept my muscles flexed to keep the pain to the bare minimum as I also had twisted my body to make them miss the most sensitive from the battering parts of my body.

But this wasn’t enough for them yet. I was still bent in half when I felt one of them kick me right where my hands were. It felt like my fingers were about to break so I adjusted my hands so that they would hit on my wrists or above and not my fingers. And sure enough they kept kicking me wherever they could, mostly on my arms since I was covering myself with them. But then the younger one aimed for my face and I wasn’t prepared for that. The force was more than what he used on the rest of his attacks, probably because this time it was my face, and the impact was right at my nose which broke it in an instant. The sting from the pain was making tears form in my eyes blinding me and the blood was flowing down my face. I could even taste it in my mouth even though I was holding it shut.

All this time I didn’t make a sound as they were mauling me to their dark and twisted heart’s content. That must have been one of the reasons that kept them going still, driving them to keep at it until they forced a sound out of me or make me beg. But I wasn’t going to do them the favor, I would take all they wanted to do and proudly endure it until it was over. Another kick landed on the side of my face followed by one at my ribcage and then another at my face again. Blood was dripping from my forehead, nose and mouth and I was barely conscious at this point. The pain was lessening and my senses were getting duller by the second.

At some point I heard someone at the door talking and they both stopped. “What the fuck are you doing? The king demands to see him and he said that no one had better touch him. Do you realize that to him you just disobeyed a direct order? You could be in his place before the sun sets in two hours”. I managed to clear the tears from my eyes and I saw the two men frozen and looking pale as the guard from the other side of the door unlocked it and came inside. He pushed them away and kneeled in front of me to check me. I hadn’t seen him before but I was sure that he reminded me of something; I just couldn’t put my fingers around it.

“Go to your stations now. I won’t take you in as a favor to your father, but if you are found out then I will make sure you are the next to go to the arena and you won’t be coming back”. With that the two men left the cell in a hurry and I was left with the man that came moments before. He was trying to assess the damage but everywhere he touched I was met with pain so I pushed him away. “Stop struggling you are in a very bad condition. Those two have beaten you up worse than any person I have ever seen. But you are still alive and conscious which makes me wonder just how much you have pushed your body to train. I am trying to help you so try not to move too much”.

I felt my skin crawl and my muscles move against my will and the sensation was weird but I wasn’t about to complain if he was indeed helping me. After a few moments I felt his hands as they brushed against my face and to the places that I was bleeding. I felt the blood stop and dry on my skin before his hands moved to my arms and the pain lessened. Then he did the same with my chest and stomach before he helped me sit against the wall. I looked at my arms and saw that I was full of bruises and I was sure the rest of my body was too in that shape, or worse.

He then moved away a bit to look at me before he talked. “Those scars on your body, are they from your training”? Training he said. That was what came to his mind when he saw those scars? Did he really think I was trained to be an assassin or something and got the scars from training and missions? “No”. That was the only thing I could say to him as I was more than a bit tired and in pain, less than before, but in pain still. He looked at me suspiciously as if to make out if I was lying but then he asked me something else. “You are not an assassin are you? You look too young to be one and assassins are a lot more cryptic and they definitely don’t let themselves get captured like that. If you were one my men would be dead now and you free”.

I looked at him in the eye and I saw curiosity in his blue and green eyes. He had already deduced that I was nothing compared to assassins and he wanted to know the truth, a truth that I had no obligation to tell him. So I stayed silent and averted my eyes from his before I lowered my head from the tiredness. Giving up a minute later he rose to his feet and then made for the door but he stopped before he exited. “I don’t know why the king has such a big interest in you, but he will be coming here sometime soon. I advise you not to do something that is considered as an act of war”.

With that he left and locked the door behind him, leaving me alone once again. Slowly my consciousness started to slip and sleep found me once more; only this time it was for what seemed like mere moments to me. I woke up to low voices right outside my cell, behind the wall where I was unable to see the person. It sounded like a middle-aged man talking with someone else, and that second voice was familiar. Both of them sounded familiar to be honest. I held my head up to look at the door and the only thing I could see were shadows. The middle aged man must have been the shadow with what seemed like a long cloak like tunic and the other man was just the shadow of a head on the wall. There was also a third shadow but that one was surely a guard judging from the gear he was wearing and his hand that was holding the hilt of a sword strapped to his waist.

“He needs to know and you know that better than anyone. The more you keep it from him the more he will resent you, and he resents you enough as it is”. Who were they talking about? They sounded so familiar but my headache was back and it was hard to think straight at the moment. “That is not the time for this old friend. And I know he resents me, I just wish that it was different. I wanted to see them again for so long but I thought them lost to me. And now I’m not so sure they are not. What I did to them was the worst thing someone could do”. The shadow with the tunic turned to the cell’s direction and before he could move to where I could see him the other man grabbed his hand and stopped him. “Atreus, a piece of advice. Don’t dodge”. After a moment of thought the middle-aged man made for the door with the guard and after the guard opened it he entered alone. When he saw me he froze in his tracks and stared at me most likely but I could not see him do so. I did hear him take a long deep breath that sounded too forced to me before he moved again. As he came closer I saw the man that was a shadow before, tall and full of muscles that were concealed but his clothes that seemed to have stretched to accommodate them. He was wearing a cloak like coat in white and gold that matched the colors of his tunic underneath and brown leather pants with boots of the same material.

But when I looked at his face recognition hit me like a boulder to the head. The memory flooded my mind before I could even realize it and told me who the man in front of me was. That face, with the squire jaw and the wide forehead, the scar under his right cheek all along to his jaw, those eyes of pure emerald staring right at me. I kept wandering if I had truly forgotten or that memory was still buried in the depths of my mind, and here he was standing in front of me like nothing had happened. The nerve he had to do that. I got up as fast as I could and closed the distance with two footsteps before I punched him on the face with all the strength I had like he deserved. He didn’t move but he didn’t look back at me or raised his head back from where my fist left it.

Just then I was pushed to the back wall of the cell and my hands were forced to open and touch the wall. Something was holding me chained and now I realized that was the reason they made me wear those things on my wrists. They were enchanted to keep me chained to the wall in case I wasn’t behaving were they? I looked as the man in front of me raised his head slowly and could barely look at me. In his eyes I could see shame and regret, sadness and grief, but I didn’t care about that. He deserved it; he deserved every bit of those emotions and so much more for what he did. He deserved pain like mine. “You… You dare show your face to me after everything you’ve done”?

He clenched his fists and kept an expressionless mask on his face; the only glimmer of his true feelings resided in his eyes that he couldn’t hide. His eyes were focused on mine, never leaving even for a second, and he had already seen my condition. Was it hard for him to see me like this? It sure as hell wasn’t for me. “Hello, son”. SON? How dare he call me that? Do I look like his son to him? Every part of me wanted to punch him again, this time with more force than before but I was chained to the wall and the guard entered the cell with his hand ready to draw his sword. But when he came to me he punched me in the face like I did to his lord apparently. I immediately brought my head back to the same position and with a defiant expression taunted him more. “Is this the best you can do? A woman desperate for her life strikes with more power than you”. And just like that he punched me again and again and again until the man behind him raised his voice and ordered him to go back outside and not come in again unless he is told to. He kept his head turned to the door at the direction the guard was standing and let out another breath before he looked back at me almost forcefully.

“I’m sorry about that. They tend to be irrational and impulsive sometimes”. He was clearly uncomfortable to be here with me, and I could relate to that. I didn’t want to be near him at all too. He took one step closer to me and when he saw that I averted my eyes from his and looked at the wall with hatred and resentment he lowered his head and backed away again. “Is this because of what they did to you”? At that moment I knew that he was trying to avoid the subject, he was trying to avoid responsibility. And I couldn’t hold back a small laugh from his comment. It has been years since I last laughed and the mere action felt weird and out of place. The sound was coarse like it was the first time I was laughing and I didn’t know how to do so, or I just couldn’t remember how to do it properly. That didn’t go unnoticed and I saw him cringe at the sound of my poor excuse of a laugh and that alone made me laugh even more until I had to catch my breath.

He was still looking at me expecting an answer that he was sure he wouldn’t like, and I would make sure he didn’t. “You know, I don’t remember the last time I laughed, it must have been before I was taken. I don’t even remember how to do it properly and you made me laugh again. Are you really naïve enough to think this is because of my current injuries or this cell? I have been in a cell before, for years. I have been injured before much worse than this. This has nothing to do with my current condition”. I could tell that he was hoping I would lie and go along with his plan of conversation, but I wasn’t that kind. I was not kind enough to let him go without letting him know how I felt about him or what I have been through because of him. What he have been through all these years. “Do you remember what you did? You do know that parents raise their children right? Do you remember that you did the exact opposite of that by abandoning us in a different continent, in the middle of a huge ass forest, in the middle of fucking nowhere”?

My tone was harsh and unforgiving, just like it should be given the circumstances. He knew that what he did was irredeemable to my eyes now, that it would always be irredeemable no matter what happened and that was just a good a start as any. He desperately tried to explain himself and I saw his emotionless façade breaking right there and then as he was holding his hands open palms facing the ceiling. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. There are things you don’t know. I wanted to raise you myself to be the man that you are supposed to become but you were not safe, neither was your sister. You were supposed to be taken to an old friend to be raised safely, away from the danger that surrounded me and your mother”. Desperation was taking its place on the top of what I was getting from him. His eyes were watering and his face was turning red. His voice was cracking and his breaths were more like pants and sobs before a teary breakdown and I enjoyed everything. I was still mad at him for everything so I pushed even more and told him exactly how his plan unfolded.

“And look how your perfect plan worked out. We were left in a forest alone to die. We wandered for days until we found a village and then for months we were starving and lived on the corner of a dead end street until my powers manifested and I was so useless that I could barely hunt with them. A hunter took us in a year later when we were more dead than alive and he passed away shortly after, leaving me to care for Ashe and what he left behind and years later Lars came and burned the village to find Ashe and take her away for his plan. He had me put in Redgard’s arena where I was a prisoner for five years and possibly took more lives than the days I’ve lived. And then when I finally escaped I had to survive mana fever and almost dying by a giant boar before I found Lars and then your guards had to interfere”. By the time I finished talking I was out of breath and angrier than I have ever been in my life. I was out of control right that moment and I was trying to calm down because I knew I was better than this, but I didn’t want to be better. I wanted him to suffer like I did. I wanted him to know the despair I have felt all my life. I wanted him to break like I broke all these years ago. “I’m here because of your selfish and inexcusable mistake. Do you know that I had to lie to her that I didn’t remember you? I had to look her in the eyes every single time when she was pleading me to remember and tell her that I can’t, that I was too young to remember my life from before when I knew I was hurting her by lying”.

He was looking at the floor by now, not daring to raise his gaze to look at me blaming him for what he did, for all that he put us through. I knew I was hurting him, and I didn’t care. He deserved the pain that he himself brought upon him. And the truth is painful most of the time. “I secretly hoped that I would never see you before all this. I wanted nothing to do with you. But now I want you to feel the consequences of what you did”. He raised his head again and he was trembling. His face was red from shame and guilt and he was outright crying now. Even his voice sounded more broken than the cry of a beaten animal. “Son I...” I never wanted to hear that word from him again. His son was the one he abandoned eleven years ago, and he was dead. I wasn’t that person any more.

My rage had reached the point where I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I wanted to get out of these enchanted chains and give him a piece of my mind with something other than words but the chains were still containing me. Even so I felt the anger boil more and more and I was visibly trembling from it. Without thinking I started pulling on the metallic wristbands so hard that after a certain point I felt the liquid as it run down my skin. My blood. There was no pain in the action, just need. Just then something primal inside me took control and I felt my mana expand from within me and give me strength. I pulled harder and placed my feet on the wall to use more power and then I pulled on as much mana as I could to use my magic. “Don’t you dare call me that ever again; you don’t have the right to do it. Mana Burst”.

Despite the blood still running on my skin and staining the floor I was pulling even harder as my body was being pushed to its limits from my enhancing magic. I had never used so much mana to enhance myself that much. All the mana I had created until now and I was trying to get rid of was being drained, all the mana I had was being used up in this sudden primal burst I was having and a vibrating wave of mana came from within my body and spread outward to the world. Suddenly, the wristbands broke, the metal fell to the floor with my blood and I was free, and the only thing I did was to punch him in the face with everything I had. It was enough force to kill him for certain but even so he managed to survive with only falling to the ground and holding his cheek and simply blood in his mouth.

He was shocked from what I did, but I wasn’t. I was still angry and he was still here feeding the fire that was burning me from the inside. My headache came back but the pain was a mere annoyance this time, a distraction that I gladly focused on as I turned away from him and clenched my hands into fists trying to restrain myself as to not attack him again and this time purposefully killing him. Then the guard entered again and helped him stand up before he spoke. “He can use magic while chained? How is that possible”? So the chains prevented the use of magic too? Or was it that they prevented the magus from absorbing mana from around him leaving no source of magic to a common magus, but since I could create my own mana I wasn’t limited like that. After the guard I heard the other man coming closer and then I saw his face too as he was calling his name. “Atreus, are you alright”? The man that was hiding behind the walls was none other than Yuto. No wonder his voice sounded familiar. He knew about this all along? He did call him old friend so he must have known. I was going to ask him at some point but I wouldn’t mind that much I was sure. He wasn’t at fault here. I looked at him with the same murderous intent that I held towards that man and I could see the fear in his eyes.

Together they took Atreus out of the cell and locked it again leaving me inside as I was still drilling holes on Atreus with my eyes. He composed himself as best as he could and then spoke again, luckily for him for something else. “You will be put to the arena for execution tomorrow as the city demands. You will face a beast unlike any you have ever seen but if you survive your crime will be forgotten legally. I do not wish to see you dead, so please win. We have much to talk about”. We have much to talk about he says. We have nothing to talk about him and me. Once I’m out of here I will go to the Eastern continent and find my sister and then we will go away, far away from here, so that I won’t be able to see him again. But on the off chance it happens I won’t be that gentle.

“I will get out of here. And when I do I better not see your face again, or the next time, make no mistake I will break you down, just like I will wait until the end of days to kill that son of a bitch that took my sister if I have to”. With that I averted my focus from them and I heard two of them going away and I felt one hesitate for a few moments before he exhaled loudly and got on his way too. So I was given a fighting chance to leave this place and my opponent was a beast not a human being. This could be worse than I thought. I could still make it in time to save her. I just need to survive and then find a way to the Eastern continent from here. The place was surrounded by the sea so it mustn’t prove too hard of a challenge. But all this will have to wait until I was out of here.