[POV Leah]

The demon’s claws seized me like chains.

We flew over darkened forests, the wind howling like grieving spirits.

When it hurled me against the stone floor, I knew my life was about to end.

The cage smelled of ancient fear.

Black iron, cold as a dead man’s bone.

Dried blood in the corners, forming maps of past sufferings.

And something else… a sweet rot clinging to the tongue.

Like wilted flowers in a coffin.

The first blow against the bars shook my world.

Glanc.

An orc carved out of nightmare.

Skin like filthy granite.

Yellow tusks, curved like butcher’s knives.

His eyes… small, black, glinting like beetles under the moon.

“Filthy princess!” he spat.

His breath stank of rotting meat.

“You’re important… but not for your blue blood.”

He grabbed my wrists through the bars.

Fingers thick as sausages, bruising instantly.

“For what’s inside you. Your magic. That little light you still have left. We’ll take it for ourselves.”

—

The hall of red runes.

My temple of torment.

Each morning, guards with reptilian skin dragged me there.

The circle on the floor blazed with symbols that burned the eyes.

The demon mages didn’t use knives.

They used living shadows.

I felt them slip beneath my skin, searching for the core of my being.

Intruders of the soul.

The pain didn’t come from my bones. It came from within.

As if they were tearing out my memories by the roots.

My father’s embrace turned into a stabbing pain.

My mother hanging from an invisible rope.

My brothers laughing while I drowned in black mire.

At first, I screamed: “Fake! All fake!”

Later… the visions left scars.

I began to feel the rope at my mother’s neck.

To taste my brothers’ betrayal.

Glanc always watched from the doorway.

Smiling.

Waiting.

“When you break,” he rumbled, “when that little light goes out… you’ll open your kingdom’s gates for us. From the inside.”

—

The seasons became whips.

Winter, I shivered under a rotting blanket, my breath turning to ghostly vapor.

Summer, thirst drove me to lick sweat from the walls.

Always Glanc. Always that broken-tusk grin.

Until the day he returned. The demon who had taken me. His presence froze even the air of the dungeon.

“The Demon King has awakened and doesn’t want her,” he said, without looking at me. As if talking about a barrel of sour wine. “She’s defective.”

Glanc grunted, disappointed:

“So what do I do with this trash? Give her to White?”

White.

A silence with eyes.

Skin like a freshly washed corpse.

Not a word when he transferred me to the new cage.

This one wasn’t iron.

It was wood reinforced with metal strips.

Next to the war-beasts’ stables.

It smelled of unknown beast urine, wagon wheel grease, and fresh human fear.

Every morning I saw the ritual:

Orcs sharpening axes stained with old massacres.

Three-eyed beasts fed with still-pulsing meat.

Black banners waving: a bleeding eye over crossed swords.

I overheard the guards outside more than once:

“…the village of the Spinners… will fall at dawn…”

“…burn the crops… take the children alive…”

—

One day they took me to the hill. White didn’t drag me.

He guided me like a leashed dog—only the leash was made of threat.

The village burned below.

Small. Defenseless.

Like a broken toy in cruel children’s hands.

And I saw.

Wooden walls shattered by monstrous claws.

Women dragged by the hair into the forest’s shadows.

A boy running… struck by a spear that nailed him to a blue-painted door.

The screams rose up the hill.

A symphony of agony.

White grabbed my chin.

His fingers, cold as winter gravestones.

Forced me to watch every detail.

“This is what you were protecting,” he murmured.

His voice, rough as sandpaper over bone.

“This is what’s left of your world. Get used to it.”

He took me to other hills.

Other villages.

Other massacres.

—

Four winters.

Countless nights spent counting the cracks in my cell’s ceiling.

I learned to vomit silently after seeing children thrown into fire,

to lower my gaze when orcs pulled out fingernails for fun,

to smile meekly when given moldy bread.

But deep down…

The spark was still there. Tiny. Indomitable. 

White thought he was breaking me.

Glanc believed I was broken.

The demons wrote me off as lost.

But in the darkness of my cage, when the beasts slept…

The spark shone brighter.

Waiting.

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