Monsters Aren't Born

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John_F_Drake
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Monsters Aren't Born

Post by John_F_Drake »

Teaser: Dreama's life burned to ash the night her magic sparked, killing her parents and leaving her utterly alone. Her nightmare, however, had only just begun. Captured by a cruel necromancer she must find a way to survive... and to thrive. Follow Dreama's rise from a lonely, orphaned girl from a small town to a mighty sorcerer who will make the world quake...
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The author of this story has read and accepted the rules for posting stories. They guarantee that the following story depicts none of the themes listed in the Forbidden Content section of the rules.

The following story is a work of fiction meant for entertainment purposes only. It depicts nonconsensual sexual acts between adults. It is in no way meant to be understood as an endorsement of nonconsensual sex in real life. Any similarities of the characters in the story to real people are purely coincidental.

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Index:

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Title: Monsters Aren't Born - Book one of Beyond Life and Death
Author: John Drake
Content Warnings:
Rape / Non-Consensual Sex (Strong): The story is built around themes of rape and violation. Includes vaginal, anal, and forced oral sex, all described graphically.
Sexual Torture & Humiliation (Strong): Sex is used as a tool for torture, degradation, and power extraction. Scenes include ritualistic violation, public display, and psychological torment.
Blood Play (Moderate): Blood is used in magical rituals, often in conjunction with sexual violence, to harvest life energy.
Domme Protagonist: The protagonist is a powerful, sexually dominant woman, who can be both victim and victimizer.
Approaching Necrophilia / Undead Sex (Mild): The story deals with dead bodies and the reanimated a lot, though no explicit sexual acts with the undead are described.
Body Horror (Moderate): Contains graphic descriptions of violence, torture, and magical alteration of the human body.

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Monsters Aren't Born

The Spark

Heat. That was Dreama's first conscious thought as she jerked awake, heart slamming against her ribs. For a moment she thought it was the lingering warmth of the nightmare that had gripped her seconds before… but instead it was real, suffocating heat pressing against her skin from all sides. Her eyes snapped open from her bed and gazed onto an incomprehensible scene: her bedroom walls consumed by roaring flames, orange tongues licking up the wooden beams of the only home she'd ever known.

This wasn't possible. She'd blown out her candle before sleep, hadn't she? Nothing could have caught flame… yet the evidence blazed before her, a hellish reality replacing the comfort of the small farmhouse bedroom she'd fallen asleep in just hours ago.

Dreama tried to scream, but her throat closed around a mouthful of thick, black smoke. She coughed violently, lungs burning as if they too had caught fire. The air shimmered with heat, the flames flashing towards her bedsheets and threatening to ignite them as well. The fire roared in her ears, a hungry beast devouring everything in Dreama’s world. "Father! Mother!" She finally managed to cry out, her voice raw and barely audible over the crackling flames.

No answer came but the groaning of burning timbers.

Panic seized her fully now. She scrambled from her bed, nightgown tangling around her legs as she stumbled toward the door. The wooden floor was scorching hot against her bare feet as she screamed, collapsing. Her nightgown smoldered where it touched the ground, the clothing threatening to ignite as well. She looked up, desperate for a way out… the door was a wall of flame. The window was just as blocked. She was trapped in an inferno with no escape.

In her mounting terror, fragments of her life flashed before her eyes. Earlier this week she had been celebrating her birthday. Her father had presented her with a small wooden pendant, carved by his own rough hands during winter evenings. It wasn’t made of precious metals or expensive jems since they had no money, but it was more valuable to her than gold or silver would have been. "For my little girl," he'd said with that gentle smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. Her mother had baked a special bread with the last of their hoarded honey. It had been delicious.

Such simple pleasures had seemed so precious mere hours ago. Now, those memories collided with her present reality as a burning beam crashed down behind her, sending up a fountain of sparks. The heat intensified impossibly, pressing against her like a physical weight. What was happening to her?

"The gods have forsaken us," she whispered, a phrase she'd heard the village elders mutter during times of hardship. But this was beyond hardship. This was damnation itself!

A scream tore through the roar of the fire. "Dreama!" Her father's voice, desperate and terrified.

“I—” Dreama tried to scream back, but the smoke interrupted her, and she coughed savagely. “I… I’m here! I’m—”

The door to her bedroom suddenly crashed down in an explosion of burning splinters. Through this gap stumbled her father, looking like a walking nightmare. His clothes were smoking, and much of his hair had been singed away. He was covered in soot and ash and bright red skin, but still he staggered towards her, reaching for her with hands that were more like charcoal than flesh.

"Father!" she screamed, the word ripped from her throat.

He grabbed her arm with rough, raw fingers. The smell of him hit her as even over the smoke… that of cooking meat and burning hair. "Come," he croaked, the word barely decipherable through ruined lips.

Dreama tried to climb back to her feet, but she felt so weak, so exhausted… like she had been hollowed out on the inside. How was it possible to be so tired? Her heart was racing a thousand times a minute. Her father didn’t hesitate though. He pulled her up, lifting her into his arms. Then he turned and carried her back through the broken-down door, dragging her through the scorching hot air and the burning flames that licked at them both. She kept her eyes open in shocked horror, unable to look away from the grotesque transformation happening to her father before her eyes as he carried her. She was fixated on staring at his ears… they were melting almost like wax as they sagged down the side of his head. His eyebrows had vanished, along with the rest of his hair.

Then they burst through the front door of the house into the cool night air. Her father collapsed immediately onto the dewy grass, dropping her and barely avoiding falling on her. Dreama landed heavily on the grass, gasping in clean air that seemed impossibly sweet after the choking smoke. "Father," she sobbed, reaching for him with trembling hands. "Father, please."

His body twitched, skin crackling like parchment. He seemed more burned meat than flesh now. His face turned towards her and his eyes found hers, still somehow recognizable in the ruin of his face. His lips moved, forming words she couldn't understand through the damage. Blood bubbled from his mouth, steaming in the night air.

"I don't understand," she pleaded, leaning closer. "Daddy… please… tell me what to do!"

He raised a blackened hand to her face, hovering just above her cheek as if afraid to touch her again. A rattling sound came from his chest.

Then the light went out of his eyes, like a snuffed candle… and they left only glazed emptiness behind.

"No," Dreama whispered. Then louder, "No!" She shook his shoulder as hard as her inexplicably weak limbs could manage. "Daddy! Daddy, don't leave me!"

But he was gone. The body beside her was no longer her father but merely the charred vessel that had once contained him. Behind her the house continued to burn, the roar of the fire accompanied now by the crash of collapsing timbers.

A terrible thought struck her like a physical blow. "Mother," she gasped.

Her eyes darted back to the burning house. There had been no sign of her mother. No screams, no desperate attempts to reach her. Had her father managed to bring her out here before finding Dreama? Had her mother already succumbed to the smoke before Dreama even woke? Was she still in there, trapped in her bed, burning as Dreama sat unharmed on the grass?

A scream of anguish tore from Dreama's throat, raw and primal. The house that had sheltered her for all her life was now her mother's pyre.

Dreama lay back on the cool grass beside her father's corpse, staring up at the sparks rising toward the night sky. Tears streamed from the corners of her eyes, cutting clean tracks through the soot on her face. The fire cast its orange glow over everything, illuminating her father's burned form in merciless detail. No one came out of the burning house.

Dreama didn't register the arrival of the villagers at first. Their voices reached her as if through water, distorted and meaningless. She remained sprawled on the grass beside her father's blackened corpse, her mind drifting in a sea of shock too vast to comprehend. Only when rough hands tried to pull her away from her father did she react, clinging to his charred arm with desperate strength, a wordless cry tearing from her raw throat. The hands retreated, and voices murmured around her like insects, growing louder as more people arrived with buckets and shovels in a futile attempt to fight the flames devouring what remained of her home.

"Form a line!" someone shouted. "Don't let it spread to the fields!"

The villagers organized themselves into a chaotic brigade, passing buckets and digging firebreaks, but their efforts made little impact on the burning house. It burned with incredible intensity, resisting the tossed water from the well as if mocking them.

Dreama remained motionless, her eyes fixed on nothing, barely breathing. Her father's body beside her had cooled enough that it no longer steamed in the night air, but the stench of burned flesh hung heavy around her. She couldn't process what had happened, couldn't piece together how her world had ended so completely in the space of minutes.

"Look at her," a woman's voice whispered, not quite quietly enough. "Not a mark on her."

"Came through that inferno clean as spring washing," muttered another.

"It ain't natural."

Startled, Dreama realized that they were right. She had felt so much heat as the air scorched her that she assumed she had been burned to a crisp… but she wasn’t. The skin of her arm where it reached for her father was pale and pink and untouched. Her nightgown was singed, largely burned away and blackened with soot, but her skin beneath was unblemished. The contrast between her unblemished body and her father's charred remains was obscene.

What kind of monster was she, to survive what had killed her parents? What unholy protection had kept her flesh from burning while her father melted before her eyes? These questions circled in her mind as she lay paralyzed by shock and grief, waiting for a dawn that would bring no comfort.

The whispers grew, circling Dreama like carrion birds, waiting for her to show weakness.

"The fire started in her room."

"Her parents burned black as coal, but she's untouched."

"Witch-whore."

This last was barely audible, but Dreama heard it, the crude term landing like a slap. Her head jerked up, suddenly aware of the ring of villagers standing at a careful distance, watching her with expressions ranging from pity to outright fear.

An elderly woman with a face like crumpled parchment pushed through the circle. Old Marta, the midwife who had helped birth most of the village children, including Dreama herself. She approached when others held back, her rheumy eyes narrowed in assessment.

"Stand back," she commanded the crowd. "The girl has Sparked."

A collective intake of breath rippled through the onlookers. Several made warding signs against evil. "Magic," someone hissed. "Knew there was something odd about her."

"Sparked this late?" another argued. "Usually happens at puberty if it's going to."

Old Marta knelt beside Dreama with creaking joints, unconcerned by the speculation behind her. Her gnarled fingers hovered over Dreama's head, not quite touching. "First time is the worst,” she murmured. "I heard when Salim Yeghts over at Brighton sparked she terrified a bunch of chickens half to death… that was some thirty years ago. First time is always the worst, when there's no control."

Dreama's lips parted, but no words came out. Her tongue felt swollen, useless.

"Did you dream of fire, child?" Marta asked gently.

The question penetrated Dreama's fog of shock. She hadn’t dreamed of fire, had she? She’d been seeing monsters. Evil lurking in the dark and chasing her… haunting her nightmares. She had been looking for something, anything, that could keep her safe from the things terrifying her. And she’d picked up a torch.

A burning torch.

Had she done this? Had her sleeping mind somehow conjured the inferno that killed her parents?

"I—" she tried, but her voice broke. It was her fault.

Her parents were dead, and it was her fault.

"Leave her be!" a man's voice boomed across the yard. The Mayor pushed his way through the crowd, his sturdy figure commanding respect despite his disheveled appearance, clearly roused from bed by the commotion. "Haven't you vultures gawked enough?"

The crowd shifted uneasily but didn't disperse. The Mayor—a stocky man with a gray-streaked beard—surveyed the scene, his expression hardening at the sight of the dead farmer. "Poor Tobin," he muttered, then raised his voice. "Someone cover him properly! Show some respect!" Two men hurried to obey, bringing a rough blanket to drape over the blackened corpse.

"What happens to her now?" someone called out. "If she's Sparked—"

"She comes to my house," the Mayor cut in firmly. "At least until the village council can meet and decide what's to be done."

This declaration provoked a fresh wave of muttering. Dreama heard snatches of it through her daze.

"Under your roof? With your children?"

"—dangerous—"

"—could burn us all in our beds—"

The Mayor silenced them with a glare. "I'll hear no more of this tonight, you superstitious louts. The girl's just lost everything. A sorcerer has no control over what happens when their magic first appears, and I won’t have you blaming the girl. Have you no heart?"

As the arguing continued, Dreama barely heard them… horror continuing to crash through Dreama's numbness like a physical blow. She had done this. The nightmare, the strange heat she'd felt building in her chest—it had somehow escaped her sleeping body and manifested as real fire. She… she was a sorcerer. She had magic. And that magic had murdered her parents.

A sound escaped her then, halfway between a whimper and a moan. Her hands clutched at her chest as if she could tear out the deadly power hiding within her.

"Up you come, dear," a gentle voice said. The Mayor's wife had appeared with another woman, both reaching to help Dreama to her feet.

Her legs wouldn't work at first. When she finally stood, she swayed dangerously, the world tilting around her. That was why she was so weak… so tired. Because she had conjured those flames. The two women steadied her with firm hands, but Dreama noticed how they touched only her nightgown, avoiding direct contact with her skin.

They're afraid of me, she realized. They’re probably afraid I’m going to kill them too. And they should be.

She glanced back at the burning ruin one last time as they led her away. Somewhere in that inferno were her mother's remains, now nothing but ash and bone. The blanket-covered mound of her father lay on the grass, village men already discussing how to dig a grave come daylight. A lifetime of love and security, reduced to smoking ruins in a single night.

With each step away from the scene, Dreama's self-loathing grew. She was a murderer. A monster who had killed her own parents. The worst part was that she couldn't even understand how she'd done it. The power that had erupted from her was as mysterious as it was deadly.

The Mayor's wife wrapped a woolen blanket around her shoulders, its rough texture strange against Dreama's skin. "Poor child," the woman murmured.

They led her to a small guest room, its sparse furnishings a sharp contrast to the homey clutter of her lost bedroom. As the door closed behind her, leaving her in blessed solitude, Dreama finally allowed her legs to give way. She sank to the floor, buried her face in her hands, and wept silently for all she had destroyed. When she passed out, she slept for hours, and did not dream.

—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-

When next she woke, Dreama knew something was wrong.

The blonde woman’s eyes snapped open in the unfamiliar darkness of the guest room, her body instantly alert. She couldn't name what had awakened her… she could hear no sound, see no light, recognize no movement. Something, though, had changed in the fabric of the quiet house around her. The air felt different, too still, as if the building itself were holding its breath. She sat up slowly, heart accelerating in her chest for reasons she couldn't articulate. The silence pressed against her eardrums like a physical weight. No creaking timbers, no distant snores, no whispered conversations from the family quarters.

Dreama slipped from the bed, bare feet finding the cool wooden floor. She hesitated at the door, fingers trembling as they reached for the handle. Some primal instinct screamed at her to stay put, to barricade herself in, to hide under the bed like a frightened child. But she needed to know. With a shallow breath, she eased the door open and peered into the dark hallway.

No lamps burned. Moonlight spilled through a window at the far end, casting everything in silver and shadow. The hallway stretched empty before her, but that wrongness persisted, a sickening certainty that something terrible waited to be discovered. She took one step, then another, drawn forward against her will.

At the top of the stairs, a metallic smell hit her—copper-rich and unmistakable. Blood. Her stomach clenched, bile rising in her throat even before her eyes found its source.

The mayor’s oldest child lay sprawled at the foot of the stairs, his face frozen in disbelief. His throat gaped open in a second, grotesque mouth that stretched from ear to ear, so deeply cut that his head lolled at an impossible angle, barely attached to his body. Blood had poured from the wound, spreading across the floorboards in a dark pool that gleamed wetly in the moonlight. His nightshirt was soaked crimson from collar to hem.

Dreama's knees buckled. She caught herself against the wall, a small sound escaping her lips before she could stifle it. The need to flee battled with horrified fascination. This couldn't be happening. Not again. Not another night of death. She clutched the wall for support and ran, forcing her leaden legs to carry her down the hallway toward the family's bedrooms. The first door stood ajar. She pushed it open with fingertips that barely made contact with the wood, as if it might burn her… and the Mayor's wife lay in her marriage bed, dark hair fanned across her pillow, throat slashed like her oldest child’s had been. The bedding beneath her had soaked up so much blood that the mattress made a squelching sound as Dreama's weight shifted the floorboards. The woman's eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling, her mouth open in what must have been her final scream.

A sob built in her chest, but before it could escape, a voice spoke from behind her. "The new sorceress awakens."

The voice was deep, cultured, almost pleasant—and all the more terrifying for it. Dreama spun around, nearly losing her balance in her haste.

A man stood at the end of the hallway, blocking her path to the stairs. Tall and lean, he wore a noble’s vest of such deep blue it appeared black in the moonlight, over such a perfectly white shirt that it could only be the result of wealth. His face was angular, handsome in a cold way, framed by dark hair pulled back from high cheekbones. But it was his eyes that transfixed her—pale blue and luminous, regarding her with the detached interest of a man examining an unusual insect.

In one hand, he held a curved dagger, its blade gleaming wet. With his other hand, he casually polished the weapon against a cloth, his movements unhurried and precise. "Who—" Dreama began, but her throat closed around the question.

The man smiled, revealing teeth too perfect, too white. "Oh, but you’re right… I am being rude. I am Rastin," he said, as if they were meeting at a village gathering rather than in a house of slaughter. "And you are the fire girl who has caused such a stir and caused me to come to this empty, waste of space village in the middle of nowhere.” He smiled at her. “Who might you be?”

Dreama's survival instinct finally kicked through her shock. She turned and ran—or tried to. Her body suddenly froze mid-step, muscles locking into place as if turned to stone. She couldn't move, couldn't even fall. Something invisible held her suspended in her flight posture, one foot raised, arms reaching forward… and a wave of power that felt slimy and cold washed over her skin. "That's quite rude," Rastin said mildly from behind her. “I didn’t give you permission to leave.”

He approached her immobilized form, circling her like a predator assessing its prey. His footsteps made no sound on the wooden floor. Up close, she could see the fine network of scars on his exposed skin, deliberate patterns that spoke of ritual rather than accident. "You have no idea what you are, do you?" he asked, stopping directly in front of her, close enough that she could smell his expensive cologne. "You're valuable, girl. Significant magical potential. Such people usually are sent to one of the mage academies as quickly as possible, to learn to harvest their rare gifts, and once there they are quite unreachable for someone like me. It was fortunate I was in the area, and close enough that I felt you Spark.”

Dreama couldn't speak, couldn't scream, couldn't even widen her eyes in terror. Whatever magic held her was absolute, leaving only her mind free to race with panic.

Rastin reached out one long-fingered hand and stroked her cheek with cold fingers. His touch sent revulsion crawling across her skin like insects, but she couldn't flinch away. There were rubies sewn into his sleeve, she realized, and they caught the faint light as he touched her. “What… are you…” Dreama forced the words out.

"They call me a necromancer, my dear," he explained conversationally, as if lecturing a disappointing student. "It means I’m a sorcerer, like you, only I refused to be restrained by those fools at Morninglight. I choose to seek real power and work with death magic—the most honest magic there is, since all life ends in death eventually." He smiled again, the expression never reaching his eyes. "Of course, Morninglight or any of the nearby kingdoms don’t exactly approve of someone like me, so I don’t have many resources of my own to work with… which makes finding someone like you to harvest quite the stroke of luck.”

His fingers traced down from her cheek to her neck, lingering over her pulse point. "When your magic exploded last night, I felt it from miles away. Such raw power, untamed and wild." He leaned closer, his breath ghosting across her face. "I came to claim what is rightfully mine by virtue of superior strength. That's the natural order, after all—the strong take from the weak."

Dreama's mind screamed in denial, but her body remained frozen, helpless.

"You belong to me now," Rastin stated, the casual certainty in his voice more frightening than any shouted threat could have been. "Your status in life has changed, girl. From villager to sorceress to orphan to my slave, all in the span of a single day." He stepped back, admiring her as one might admire a newly purchased horse. "Life can change so quickly, can't it?"

Behind Rastin, Dreama noticed for the first time the silent figures standing around the room—at least six of them in hooded robes, faces hidden in shadow. They had made no sound, no movement to draw attention to their presence. How long had they been watching? Had they participated in the slaughter of the Mayor's family?

Dreama swallowed. "I… I will never belong to you," she spat, surprising herself with the venom in her tone. Fear still coursed through her veins, but anger pushed past it—anger at this monster who had slaughtered an innocent family, who spoke of people as resources to be harvested. All of her fear, all of her anger and confusion at what had happened to her family poured out of her, finally given an acceptable target. She felt the wave of his magic paralyzing her, and finally realized what had woken her up… she had felt this man’s sorcery, his necromancy, sliding through the air. "Kill me if you want, but I'd rather die than be your slave."

Rastin's expression shifted, amusement giving way to cold anger. "You misunderstand your situation," he said, each word precise and clipped. "This isn't a negotiation. You don't have choices anymore."

With a flick of his fingers, an invisible force slammed into Dreama like a physical blow. The paralysis broke only for her to be hurled backward, flying through the air and into the next room to send her crashing down on the home’s table. The impact knocked the breath from her lungs. Before she could recover, her limbs were wrenched outward, spreading her eagle on the wooden surface. No ropes bound her, and nothing visible held her down, yet she couldn't move. She couldn't even close her legs as her nightgown rode up to expose her thighs.

"I teach lessons," Rastin said, approaching the table with measured steps. "In a better timeline for you, you’d become one of my lucky apprentices, learning at my feet… but I already have enough of those. You will be learning a very different kind of lesson from me." He began to disrobe, methodically unfastening clasps and ties. "And the first of those is going to be not to antagonize your betters.”

The outer robe fell away, revealing a lean, muscular torso covered in ritual scars. The hundreds of precise cuts formed elaborate patterns across his chest and abdomen. More disturbing were the gemstones embedded directly in his flesh—not sewn to clothing but inserted beneath the skin, creating a constellation of pulsing red lights that throbbed in perfect synchronization.

Dreama struggled against the invisible bonds, panic rising as he continued to strip in front of her. She was young and naive, but not that naive. "No," she gasped. "Please, don't."

Rastin ignored her plea, continuing to undress until he stood naked before her. More scars and crystals adorned his thighs and arms, creating an effect like stars against a night sky. His cock stood erect between his legs, the sight of it sending fresh waves of terror through Dreama. It was throbbing with his arousal. and it terrified her to look at it. It seemed so big…

"I'll burn you," she threatened desperately. "I… I can do that. I’ll burn you to ash!"

This provoked a genuine laugh from Rastin, the sound devoid of warmth. "Then do it girl!” He raised his hands invitingly. “Burn me. Summon your flame… if you can.”

Dreama tried it. She thought of fire. She thought of the torch. She thought of the nightmares and the monsters. Every time she tried to think about anything, however, all she could think about was her dead parents. Nothing happened.

He laughed at her again. “That was what I thought, girl. You have no idea how to access it. How to use it. Untrained magic is useless against someone like me." He positioned himself between her forcibly spread legs. "And you’ll never get an opportunity to learn.”

Rastin pressed his bloody knife to the delicate fabric at Dreama’s collarbone. The blade was cold, but it was her terror that made her shiver uncontrollably, as if the metal itself had cut through her soul before it even touched her skin. She knew that it had just killed the people here, so having it touch her felt especially disgusting. Dreama tried to twist away, but the invisible force holding her to the table rendered her body utterly useless for anything but the sick spectacle. She was forced to stare up Rastin while the necromancer worked at his leisure.

He pinched the fabric of her nightgown between two fingers. With savored slowness, Rastin made a cut straight down the center, all the way to her navel. The knife didn’t so much as catch on the thread; it parted the worn, hand-embroidered cotton in a single smooth line. The fabric collapsed off her shoulders and puddled at her sides, baring the full length of her torso in the chill air. Dreama felt her face heat with shame, a hot prickle that spread over her cheeks and down her chest, blooming even as she struggled to hide her body with the hands that would not move, the legs that would not close. For years now the boys had been staring at her breasts, so she had kept them hidden beneath her shirt. Those breasts, high and firm, were fully exposed now.

The necromancer’s eyes flicked over her, appraising as the knife traced a line between her breasts, down her belly. He paused just above her modesty, and she realized with a jolt that he was deliberately savoring the moment—drawing it out, making her wait for the inevitable humiliation. He sliced the nightgown up the other direction, splitting it fully open, then grasped the ruined dress in both hands and yanked it from under her. The rough fabric dragged harshly across her hips and thighs, scratching against the soft tuft of hair between her legs before tearing free and leaving her completely exposed.

Dreama was naked. On the mayor’s table. With a monster looming over her and an audience of silent, robed men watching from the darkness. Every part of her was laid bare: the pale, unblemished skin that betrayed her rural life of scant sun and hard labor; the scattering of freckles down her arms and across her chest; the soft, dark hair between her thighs, which she’d never thought about before, now suddenly mortifying. Even the faded birthmark on her hip, which her mother had always said was in the shape of a crescent moon, was on display for these strangers.

Dreama could have wept from shame if terror hadn’t squeezed her heart so tight that she could barely breathe.

"Please," she begged, abandoning pride for survival. "Don't do this."

Rastin ran a hand up her inner thigh, his touch clinical and possessive. "Virgins are so adorable,” he mocked, rubbing the head of his cock against her dry entrance. His pale eyes locked with hers. "And breaking in a new slave is one of the most enjoyable parts of having power."

Dreama screamed as he thrust into her with brutal force, tearing through her maidenhood without hesitation. The pain was excruciating, radiating outward from between her legs like molten metal being poured into her core. He showed no consideration for her agony, no pause to allow her body to adjust. He simply took, pounding into her dry cunt with methodical strokes that felt like they were splitting her in half.

"Stop!" she sobbed, tears streaming down her face. "You're tearing me apart!"

"That's rather the point," Rastin replied, his breathing only slightly elevated despite his exertion. His hands gripped her hips, fingers digging bruises into her flesh as he pulled her against him with each thrust.

Blood from her torn virginity slicked his movements, creating an obscene squelching sound that filled the room. Each impact of his hips against hers sent fresh waves of pain through her body.

Around the table, the hooded figures watched in silence, their faces hidden but their attention fixed on the rape. Their passive observation added another layer of humiliation—being violated not just by one monster but displayed like an animal to others, her pain and degradation a spectacle for their entertainment.

Dreama closed her eyes, trying to transport herself elsewhere: Back to her family's farm, to happier times, to the simple life she'd taken for granted. Instead, the moment she thought of her family she only thought about them burning to death. Each brutal thrust dragged her back to the horrific present, and it was almost a relief to be being violated rather than be forced to dwell on her family’s deaths… even if the eyes of the others watching seemed to pierce right through her.

The necromancer slammed the knife down into the table, just before her eyes… Dreama saw her own terrified face looking back at her in the reflection. "Look at me," Rastin commanded.

When she kept her eyes closed, his hand closed around her throat, squeezing until black spots danced behind her eyelids. She was forced to open her eyes, to look up into his face: Composed and haughty even in the midst of rape, as if he were holding court before a throne rather than committing an atrocity. "There you are," he said, easing the pressure on her throat. "I want to see the light in your eyes dim as you accept your new reality."

His pace increased, the thrusts becoming more erratic. Dreama felt a change in his breathing, a tightening of his grip on her hips. With a final, brutal thrust, Rastin buried himself to the hilt inside her and groaned, his cock pulsing as he emptied himself into her unprotected womb. The sensation of his hot seed filling her violated passage made Dreama gag, bile rising in her throat.

"Perfect," he murmured, remaining inside her for several moments longer, as if ensuring every drop of his semen remained trapped in her body. When he finally withdrew, a mixture of blood and seed leaked from between her thighs, running down onto the wooden table in a viscous stream.

The invisible bonds holding Dreama spread-eagled suddenly released. She curled into herself immediately, drawing her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around them, trying to make herself as small as possible. Sobs wracked her body, the full horror of what had just happened crashing over her in waves. Her torn cunt throbbed with pain, her insides feeling raw and wounded.

Rastin didn't spare her another glance as he methodically redressed, arranging his robes with precise movements. Once fully clothed, he turned to his followers.

"Prepare her for travel," he ordered. "And collect any of that blood that dripped from her. A sorcerer’s virgin blood will have some use for us."

Dreama barely registered his words through her haze of pain and shame. She remained curled on the table, trembling uncontrollably, her world narrowed to the agony between her legs. When Rastin's followers finally pulled her from the table, her legs buckled beneath her, refusing to support her weight. The pain radiating from between her thighs was too intense, too raw. Her body had been violated in ways her sheltered mind had barely comprehended existed.

One of the hooded figures grunted in annoyance when she collapsed, then roughly hauled her up by her armpits while another bound her wrists with coarse rope. She hung between them like a slaughtered animal, head lolling, blood and semen still leaking down her inner thighs and soaking into what remained of her torn nightgown. "Master doesn't like damaged goods," one muttered to the other. "Carry her properly."

They hoisted her between them, her bound hands unable to grip anything for balance. Every jostling step sent spikes of agony through her ravaged cunt. She bit her lip to keep from screaming, the coppery taste of her own blood filling her mouth.

The cool night air hit her skin as they carried her outside. Dawn was still hours away, but the moon was high in the sky. In that liminal light, Dreama saw that the Mayor's house was not the only destination Rastin's followers had visited during the night. Several other buildings showed signs of disturbance—doors hanging open, personal belongings scattered on doorsteps.

They carried her to where a small procession had already gathered at the village outskirts. Dreama's dazed eyes widened at the sight of other captives—men and women from around the village were collected, all bound and guarded by robed figures. She recognized faces from neighboring farms, people she'd seen at market days or festivals. One man bore fresh whip marks across his back, visible through his torn shirt. A woman clutched a crying infant to her breast, her face streaked with tears. A boy hardly into his teens trembled visibly, his pants darkened with urine. All of them stood with vacant expressions, eyes downcast, spirits already broken… or perhaps enchanted and made helpless by Rastin’s magic.

"This is the last one," one of her carriers called. “The one that matters."

Several of the hooded guards turned to look, their faces still hidden in shadow beneath their hoods. One made a crude gesture, thrusting his hips forward. Another laughed. Dreama felt her face burn with shame, knowing they all knew what had happened to her. She hung her head, unable to meet even the glances from her fellow captives. She didn’t know if they would be sympathetic or accusing.

As they took their place in the procession, Dreama twisted painfully to look back at the village one last time. From this vantage point, she could see the blackened skeleton of her family's farm in the distance, a thin wisp of smoke still rising from its ruins. Less than two days ago, that had been her home, the only place she'd ever known. Her parents had been alive, their simple existence stretching before them in an expected pattern of seasons and harvests. Now all of it was gone, along with her village.

A commotion at the front of the procession drew her attention. Rastin emerged from the Mayor's house, wiping his hands on a cloth. He mounted a black horse that pawed the ground impatiently, its eyes rolling white with fear of its rider. From his elevated position, Rastin surveyed his collection of new slaves with the satisfied expression of a successful merchant taking inventory.

His gaze lingered on Dreama, a small smile playing at the corners of his mouth. The memory of those cold hands on her body, that hardness tearing into her, made her stomach heave. She retched, but nothing came up—she hadn't eaten since before the fire. "Move out," Rastin commanded, his voice carrying easily in the still morning air.

The procession lurched into motion. Dreama's carriers adjusted their grip, their rough hands digging into her thighs and back. One of them, his breath stinking of stale beer, leaned closer to her ear. "Lucky cunt," he whispered. "Master usually lets us have the new girls after he's done with them. But not you. Says you're special."

The other carrier chuckled. "Probably doesn't want us spoiling his new toy. Did you see how he looked at her? She'll be warming his bed regular, this one."

"Must have been good," the first replied. "Heard him rip her open like gutting a beast. She screamed like one too."

Dreama closed her eyes, trying to shut out their words, but they continued to discuss her as if she were merchandise, debating what made her valuable enough for Rastin's personal attention. Their crude speculation mixed with the physical pain of being carried, creating a haze of misery that threatened to drown her. The procession wound its way out of the village, following a dirt road that led toward Suntree forest. Dreama had never traveled beyond the nearest market town. Now she was being carried into unknown territory, away from everything familiar, with no hope of return.

They crested a hill that would take the village out of sight forever. Dreama twisted in her carriers' grip, ignoring the pain, desperate for one last glimpse of home. The small cluster of buildings that had comprised her entire world grew smaller in the distance, soon to disappear behind the hill's shoulder. Then she headed down the other side, and they vanished.

Dreama would never see the place she came from ever again.

End of chapter 1
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I hope you enjoyed this story. You can find many other stories by me, or commission me, here.
Last edited by John_F_Drake on Sat Feb 07, 2026 5:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
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John_F_Drake
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Re: Monsters Aren't Born

Post by John_F_Drake »

The Necromancer

Cold.

Wet.

Pain.

Fragmentary sensations pierced through the darkness of Dreama's consciousness like daggers, forcing her reluctantly back to a reality she desperately wished to never return to. Her eyelids fluttered open, crusted with dried tears and grime, to reveal nothing but shadows dancing across damp stone walls. The stench hit her next – a thick, foul miasma of mold, piss, and her own unwashed body. She tried to move, but every muscle screamed in protest, her groin still raw and torn from having been violated, and she barely felt like she could move. How long had she been lying here? Hours? Days? There were no windows to the outside to tell. A thin shaft of gray light filtered through a small barred gap set in the cell’s door was her only view outside of this tiny cell.

Her pain was also no guide to how long it had been. The throbbing between her legs felt eternal, as if her rape had both just happened and been going on forever. Dreama's hand trembled as she reached between her thighs, wincing as her fingers touched crusted blood mixed with the necromancer's dried seed. The mixture had leaked out of her and dried on her inner thighs, creating a sticky, disgusting film that pulled at her skin when she tried to move her legs. A sob escaped her throat as the memory of Rastin forcing himself inside her flooded back. His cold eyes staring into her.

The cell she was trapped in was barely larger than a grave. When she tried to sit up, her head struck against rough-hewn stone faster than she thought it would, scraping her scalp and sending fresh pain radiating through her skull. She slumped back, her bare skin pressing against the filthy floor. Something wet seeped beneath her, and the acrid sting of urine burned against her raw skin where it had pooled beneath her during unconsciousness. The humiliation of lying in her own waste was just one more indignity heaped upon the mountain of violations she'd endured.

Beyond the barred door of her cell, she heard movement. Heavy footfalls. The scrape of something being dragged across stone. There was something wrong about that sound, like the walker was dragging his feet, and something about it made her skin crawl. The footsteps grew louder, approaching her cell. Dreama's heart hammered against her ribs. She tried to press herself into the corner of her cell, to make herself smaller, invisible. The effort sent fresh spikes of agony through her abused body. Her breathing came in rapid, shallow bursts that scraped her dry throat raw.

A clanking sound outside her door. Metal on metal. Keys.

The door swung open with a screech of rusted hinges that pierced her eardrums like needles. Flickering torchlight spilled into the cell, momentarily blinding her. When her vision cleared, Dreama's scream died in her throat, strangled by horror.

Two men she knew from the village stood in the doorway.

No—not men.

Braden was a young, fit man from the farm just a few miles down the road from hers… he had always fancied her, she knew, but he had never been gross about it. He had just always found an excuse to walk beside her when they were both leaving town with supplies, or help her when she was loading bales of wheat into the wagon. Kevaan was the opposite… a trouble-making youth who was the son of the butcher. His father was a kindly man, and well loved… which was the only reason his menace of a son was tolerated. Even so, last summer the mayor had made the boy and his father pay for the most recent damages to the town square. Both had been large men. One of them she had liked, the other she had been afraid of.

Both were gone now, and something else was in their place.

What entered her cell were walking corpses. Their skin hung loosely on their muscular frames, and both bore gruesomely fatal wounds—Kevaan’s throat was slashed open, revealing the white gleam of his spine, while Braden had a gaping hole in his chest where his heart should have been. Their eyes were bottomless pits of blackness, devoid of life or consciousness. Both were naked, their dead tools hanging flaccid between their legs. They were obviously dead.

It didn’t stop them from walking around.

Horror gripped Dreama, and she suddenly wanted to vomit. "No," she cried out, scrambling backward until her spine pressed against the cold stone wall. "Stay away from me!"

The corpses didn't speak. She wasn’t sure they could speak. Instead, they moved with jerky, puppet-like motions, reaching for her with hands that felt like cold, wet leather against her skin. One grabbed her by the hair, yanking her head back with enough force to make her neck crack painfully. The other seized her arm, its grip bruising as it dragged her forward.

"Let me go!" Dreama kicked out, her bare foot connecting with the first undead's thigh. It was like kicking a side of beef—unyielding and lifeless. Her efforts were completely ignored by the corpses holding her body as they hauled her to her feet. The stone floor scraped against her bare feet, opening fresh cuts that left bloody smears behind her as they took her out into the corridor.

"This the special one?" A living voice came from further down the hall.

The dead things couldn't answer, but they turned her body toward the voice, displaying her like merchandise.

"Fuck me, she is a pretty little thing." Heavy footsteps approached, and a bearded man in leather armor came into view. He circled her, eyes roving over her naked body with undisguised lust. "Young, too. Shame for her."

Dreama tried to spit at him, but her mouth was too dry… the little spit she gathered just dribbled out her lips. The man laughed. "Got some fight left, does she? Won't last long." He reached out, squeezing her breast roughly. “Hold her still.”

The undead guards slammed Dreama against the wall, her head cracking against stone hard enough that she saw stars. While the monsters held her immobile, the man shoved a filthy rag into her mouth, gagging her so forcefully she thought her jaw would pop. The taste of sweat, blood, and worse filled her mouth, triggering her gag reflex. She retched helplessly around the cloth, unable to expel it or draw a proper breath.

"Take her to the master," the living guard commanded the corpses holding her. “He awaits her in the study."

The undead yanked her away from the wall and resumed dragging her down the corridor. Her bare feet slipped in the filth coating the floor, unable to find purchase. Through tear-blurred eyes, she glimpsed other cells lining the passage. Emaciated arms reached through the bars. Hollow eyes stared out from gaunt faces. One woman pressed herself against her cell door, lips moving in what might have been a prayer.

They dragged her around a corner and up the stairs, and then through several other turns that Dreama was too out of it to follow. Here the walls were wood and plaster, this was a real home compared to the dank dungeon below it. Unlike the prison section, this passage was clean, the air scented with herbs and incense, the walls covered with art. Daylight shone through windows to one side that revealed a forest… her forest?

The hallway ended with an ornate door. One of the undead reached for the handle, pulling the heavy door open. Light spilled out—the warm glow of dozens of black candles arranged in concentric circles around a metal table. Robed figures sat in a ring around the chamber, faces hidden in shadow. From the way the robes clung to their bodies, they were men and women both.

And at the head of the table stood Rastin, his pale eyes lighting with interest as they fell upon Dreama. He smiled, the expression never reaching those cold eyes. "Ah," he said, his cultured voice carrying easily across the chamber. "Our special subject has arrived. Bring her in."

The undead guards dragged her forward across the threshold. The door swung shut behind her with a sound like a tomb being sealed, and they hauled Dreama toward the metal table in the center of the chamber. Dreama tugged, trying to get away from the cruel man who had slaughtered and enslaved her village, but it just meant the corpses’ cold hands bruised her body more as they lifted her and forced her down to the metal table, slamming her down on it hard enough to knock what little breath she had left from her lungs. Iron manacles waited at each corner, and the guards wrenched her limbs outward, securing her wrists and ankles with brutal efficiency. The position left her completely vulnerable, spread-eagled on her back with her butt just barely hanging over the edge of the table, her sore pussy displayed like a sacrifice before the circle of watching men and women in dark robes. Panic flooded her mind as she realized she couldn't move, couldn't close her legs, couldn't shield any part of herself from what was coming.

Rastin circled the table slowly, his footsteps echoing on the stone floor. The black candles surrounding them cast his shadow in multiple directions, creating the illusion of several predators stalking her at once. His pale eyes gleamed in the flickering light, drinking in her exposed form with interest as the figures watched her from behind. They were the apprentices that Rastin had spoken of, she realized… the ones he was teaching.

"Today's lesson," he announced to the watching apprentices, "concerns the practical application of blood harvesting through ritualized suffering." His cultured voice carried effortlessly through the chamber. Rastin gestured down at Dreama. “This woman possesses significant magical potential—untapped, untrained, but potent nonetheless. Her blood contains far more energy than most… and that allows us a few options.”

Dreama twisted her head, struggling to see through tear-blurred vision. A dozen black-robed figures stood in a circle around the table, their faces partially hidden within deep hoods. She could make out enough to see they were mostly young men, some barely older than herself, all watching with undisguised fascination. One, a woman, licked her lips as her gaze traveled over Dreama’s exposed breasts.

Rastin placed his palm flat against Dreama’s stomach, then up to cup one of her breasts. “She’s a little bruised up, but still healthy. That’s important… we are looking to harvest life energy here. A sickly host will not have much of it to give.” Dreama whimpered around the filthy gag as his fingers pinched her nipple hard enough to make her arch against the restraints. She could taste the foulness of the cloth in her mouth, feel it pressing against her tongue, absorbing her saliva until her mouth felt parched and raw.

"Master," one of the apprentices spoke up, a young man with a pockmarked face, "does previous sexual use diminish the quality of the harvest?"

Rastin's lips curled into a thin smile. "An excellent question. No. While virginal blood contains unique properties… and I have harvested hers already… her suffering can actually enhance certain aspects of the energy harvested. Pain remembered amplifies pain experienced."

He produced that ornate, bone-handled dagger from his belt. The blade gleamed in the candlelight and runes etched into the metal seemed to absorb the light around them. "The skin is a boundary," Rastin continued, tracing the tip of the dagger along her collarbone, applying just enough pressure to raise a thin line of red without breaking the skin completely. "Between self and other, between life and death. When we breach it..."

The dagger tip pressed harder, parting her flesh in a shallow cut that stung like fire. Dreama jerked against her restraints, a muffled cry escaping around the gag.

"As I’ve demonstrated for you in the past, blood is the medium of life energy," Rastin explained, watching as crimson beads welled up along the cut. "It carries within it the essence of existence itself. For the necromancer, it is both tool and weapon, ink and canvas."

He continued making small, precise cuts across her torso—across the swell of her breasts, down the curve of her ribs, along her hip bones. Each slice burned like a line of fire, bringing fresh tears to Dreama's eyes. Blood trickled from the wounds, running in thin rivulets across her skin to the edges of the table where it collected in narrow channels carved into the metal. "For us, blood is the most readily available medium through which we work necromancy… the easiest way to contain the life energy we need. You’ve all practiced that plenty by now. But it also poses a problem, does it not? Bringing fresh blood sacrifices with you when you want to work powerful sorcery can be a rather large inconvenience, yes?” The assembled watchers laughed softly, and their amusement felt positively discordant in Dreama’s terror. “Thankfully, there is a way around that. Allow me to demonstrate.”

Without warning, he plunged the dagger deep into her abdomen, just below her ribs.

Dreama was so shocked at first that she didn’t even feel the pain to begin with. Her eyes widened with shock, and her muscles all tensed against the bonds. Then the agony hit, far worse than anything Dreama had ever experienced. The blade tore through muscle and tissue, scraping against organs, sending waves of white-hot pain radiating outward from the point of entry. Her scream was trapped in her throat by the gag, emerging as a strangled, animal sound that barely made it to the chamber walls. Her body convulsed against the restraints, back arching off the table as blood gushed from the wound, pouring into the channels with alarming speed.

Rastin twisted the blade with methodical precision, his expression unchanged as he watched her writhe in torment. "When the body suffers trauma, its own life energy seeks to stem the tide of the injury. For this reason, the suffering experienced by the subject directly influences the potency of the harvested energy," he lectured calmly, as if discussing crop rotation rather than torture. Through the haze of agony, Dreama heard one of the apprentices ask a question about the depth of the wound. Rastin's answer came as if from a great distance, clinical terms mixing with crude descriptions as black spots danced at the edges of her vision.

"While death yields the greatest power at once," Rastin was saying, withdrawing the blade with a sickening sound of suction. Blood fountained from the wound, hot against her cold skin. “…it is not always the most efficient. A living, suffering subject, especially one with potential, can be repeatedly harvested and provide far greater returns over time."

The dagger clattered onto the table beside her. Through tear-blurred eyes, Dreama watched Rastin disrobe from the waist down. His cock stood erect, the sight of it sending a fresh wave of terror through her already overwhelmed system. Memory of her rape at the Mayor's table flashed through her mind as he positioned himself between her thighs, but lower.

"Suffering can come in many forms," Rastin explained, dipping his fingers into her flowing blood and wiping it across the head of his erection, lubricating it with the crimson fluid. “Degradation. Hopelessness. Emotional agony. Physical torture. All of it can do a part to heighten the suffering of the subject and increase the yield of the ritual. And by far the easiest way I’ve found to get all of them at once…”

The necromancer pressed the head of his cock against her asshole, an entrance never meant for such invasion. Dreama's eyes widened in renewed panic, her body tensing involuntarily.

“…Is like this.”

Rastin pushed forward inexorably. Dreama felt the blunt, blood-slicked head of his cock press against her tight, virgin entrance and her muscles clenched instinctively, a futile attempt at self-preservation as her body recognized the imminent invasion.

The pressure increased gradually, relentlessly. The ring of muscle fought against the intrusion, but Rastin was determined. Dreama felt the exact moment her body began to surrender—a microscopic yielding that sent lightning bolts of pain radiating through her pelvis. The tight ring of muscle stretched beyond its natural limit, burning as if someone had pressed a hot coal against her most intimate flesh.

Then it slid into her. The burning stretch as he forced his way inside was unbearable. She stared down at where their bodies met, watching him slide into her with eyes nearly bugging out of her head. One inch was inside of her. Just one terrible inch, and already Dreama felt as though she were being torn in half. The necromancer paused, allowing his apprentices to observe the way her body spasmed around the intrusion. Her abdominal muscles contracted involuntarily, squeezing the stab wound and sending fresh rivulets of blood cascading down her sides.

Rastin pushed forward again, another cruel inch disappearing inside her. The stretch was worse now, a burning, tearing sensation that made Dreama's vision blur. She could feel every vein, every ridge of his cock as it forced its way deeper, scraping against the delicate tissues never meant to accommodate such an invasion. Her body tried desperately to expel him, muscles clenching and unclenching in protest, but this only seemed to heighten Rastin's pleasure. A soft groan escaped his lips, the only sign that he was affected at all by what he was doing.

"Note the way she spasms," he said to his students, his voice only slightly thicker than before. "Each time she tries to push me out, her internal muscles grip and massage the penetrating object. The more she resists, the more it hurts her… and the more energy we will get out of her blood."

Another inch. Then another. The penetration seemed endless, each fraction of movement bringing new dimensions of pain. Dreama's world narrowed to the point where her body was being split open, everything else fading to a distant blur. The cold metal table beneath her. The watching eyes of the apprentices. All secondary to the unbearable violation happening between her legs and the throbbing, bleeding stab wound in her abdomen.

She felt him reach some internal barrier, some point where her body simply could not accommodate more. Rather than retreating, Rastin shifted his angle slightly, one hand pressing down on her lower abdomen—directly on the stab wound. The explosion of pain from the knife wound momentarily overshadowed the anal violation, causing her entire body to seize. In that moment of distraction, he drove forward with brutal force, burying himself to the hilt inside her. Dreama's back arched off the table as far as her restraints would allow. The sensation of being completely filled, of having her insides rearranged to accommodate his invasion, was beyond description. She felt as though she was being impaled on a sword, split from below and hollowed out. Her guttural scream couldn't find proper voice through the filthy gag, emerging instead as a primal, animal sound of pure agony.

The necromancer remained still for several long seconds, seemingly enjoying just the sensation of being buried deep in her ass. Dreama could feel him pulsing inside her, each throb of his cock sending fresh waves of agony through her violated passage. Then, without warning, he withdrew almost completely—leaving just the head of his cock stretching her entrance. The momentary relief was shattered as he slammed forward again with enough force to shake the entire metal table. The chains of her restraints rattled as her body was jolted upward, only to be yanked back down by the manacles around her wrists and ankles.

Rastin established a brutal pace that made Dreama slide back and forth along the few inches of the table she had to work with. Each thrust drove the air from the blonde girl’s lungs, forcing her to take shallow, desperate breaths around the gag. The table groaned beneath her, metal legs scraping against stone with each powerful thrust. The sound of flesh slapping against flesh echoed obscenely through the chamber, punctuated by the wet, sucking noises as her asshole gripped onto his cruel rod. She could feel her consciousness drifting and wondered idly how much of it was from the pain and how much was from the blood loss… which one was more responsible for her reality breaking apart at the edges. The faces of the watching apprentices seemed to distort, stretching and twisting in the flickering candlelight. Some leaned forward, entranced by the display. Others took notes on parchment with quills that scratched in rhythm with Rastin's thrusts. One young woman had slipped a hand beneath her robes, her breathing visibly quickening as she watched Dreama's violation.

"For those with the sensitivity to perceive it," Rastin continued, his voice finally beginning to strain with exertion, "you can actually see the energy flowing from the subject's body into the collection channels. It manifests as a faint luminescence in the blood." He punctuated this statement with a series of brutal, jackhammer thrusts that made the entire table shudder and groan. The manacles bit into Dreama's wrists and ankles as her body was repeatedly jolted upward, only to be yanked back down to meet the next punishing invasion. Her head lolled from side to side, consciousness flickering as the dual agonies of the stab wound and anal violation competed for dominance.

Through tear-blurred eyes, Dreama noticed something horrifying—that he was right. In the blood flowing through the channels in the table, she could see a faint glow from inside it… a sickly blue light. Her very life force was being harvested, drained away with each brutal thrust. The realization brought a fresh wave of despair crashing over her, more devastating than any physical pain. She wasn't just being violated; she was being consumed.

"Don’t shy away from letting the subject know what is happening to them, either," Rastin said, as if reading her thoughts. His pace had become erratic now, his own pleasure building toward its inevitable conclusion. "The subject's awareness can only help. The hopelessness, the understanding that they are being drained: This psychological suffering amplifies the energy you will drain." Rastin's thrusts reached a fever pitch. The sound of the table groaning filled the chamber, a mechanical counterpoint to Dreama's muffled screams and the wet, obscene slapping of violated flesh. Blood from her stab wound splashed with each impact, spattering across Rastin's stomach and thighs in a grotesque painting.

As Rastin approached his climax, the light in the blood channels grew brighter, pulsing in rhythm with his thrusts and Dreama's fading heartbeat. The apprentices had fallen silent, transfixed by the display of power and cruelty before them. Some had moved closer, eager to witness the culmination of the ritual.

Dreama felt herself sliding away, consciousness receding like the tide until, with a final brutal thrust, he buried himself to the hilt in her torn passage, his body stiffening as he pumped his seed deep inside her. The sensation of his hot release filling her violated body made Dreama's stomach heave, but the gag prevented her from vomiting. She could only choke and struggle for breath as darkness crept into the edges of her vision, feeling the sensation of his seed, hot and burning, flooding her torn and bleeding insides.

Rastin withdrew from her with a wet, obscene sound, leaving her bleeding from both her stab wounds and trembling uncontrollably on the cold table. Her consciousness faded in and out, the voices of Rastin and his apprentices becoming distant, distorted echoes as shock overtook her system. Darkness came in waves, washing over Dreama's consciousness like a tide. One moment she was drowning in agony, the next floating in a gray haze where pain became distant, almost theoretical. Her eyelids fluttered, giving her fragmented glimpses of the horror show continuing around her.

Blood—her blood—still poured from the wound in her abdomen, collecting in the table's channels like water in irrigation ditches. So much blood. Too much. The rational part of her mind, the part not consumed by pain, knew she was dying. She wanted to be dead. Death would be a mercy compared to this endless violation, this systematic dismantling of her body and spirit.

Rastin moved in and out of her field of vision, his lower half still naked, his flaccid cock and abdomen stained red with her blood. He hadn't bothered to clean himself or redress, apparently unconcerned with modesty before his students. The sight of him, casually displaying the instrument of her violation while lecturing, made Dreama oddly furious. Couldn’t he allow her the slightest bit of respect or dignity?

"So, the collection phase is complete," Rastin announced, gesturing toward the table where her blood had pooled into a central depression. "But as I said, if we don’t want to work a powerful spell right now, all of this would go to waste. To prevent that, we begin the crystallization process."

He positioned himself at the head of the table, spreading his arms wide as he began to whisper arcane words of power in a language Dreama didn't recognize. The syllables seemed to cut the air like knives, each word leaving a distinct impression against the nascent sorcerous sense that had appeared in Dreama after she sparked… And the blood began to move.

At first, Dreama thought she was hallucinating from blood loss. But no—her blood was actually rising from the collection channels, defying gravity to hover in the air above her ravaged body. It coalesced into a rotating sphere, spinning faster as Rastin's chanting intensified. The crimson orb began to glow with an eerie light, pulsing in rhythm with her own failing heartbeat.

"Witness the transformation," Rastin instructed his apprentices. "Life force separated from its vessel and condensed into pure power."

The hovering blood contracted suddenly, the sphere shrinking as if crushed by invisible hands. The glow intensified, shifting from red to a deeper, more sinister crimson-black. Dreama felt each contraction as a corresponding squeeze around her heart, as if something was being torn from her very essence. Each pulse left her feeling more hollow, more depleted. With a final word from Rastin, the blood solidified, transforming from liquid to solid in an instant. What remained floating in the air was a roughly pyramid-shaped crystal about the size of a walnut, black and pulsing with a crimson inner light that mimicked a heartbeat.

Dreama recognized it immediately. It was just like the gems embedded in Rastin's flesh. The same sort of gem, made from people like her. People he had violated, cut open, bled dry. Each one represented a life harvested, a victim tortured for power.

Rastin plucked the hovering crystal from the air, holding it up for his students to observe. The gem caught the candlelight, sending crimson reflections dancing across the chamber walls. "This is called a blood crystal," he proclaimed with evident satisfaction. "This is what becomes possible when harvesting from a subject with innate magical potential. The sorcerous energy contained here is stable. You can carry this around, and use it to fuel your necromancy whenever you need it."

Through her haze of pain and approaching unconsciousness, Dreama watched as the apprentices crowded closer, eyes fixed on the bloodcrystal with naked hunger.

"Master," one of them spoke up—a young man with a nervous twitch at the corner of his mouth. "The subject's breathing is becoming irregular. I believe she's approaching death."

Rastin glanced down at Dreama's pale face, her blue-tinged lips visible around the filthy gag. His expression showed no concern, only mild annoyance at having his lecture interrupted.

"An observant but unnecessary comment," he replied coldly. "I am well aware of the subject's condition. Death comes for all things eventually—but not yet for this one. She has many more harvests to provide." He tucked the bloodcrystal into a small velvet pouch, then approached Dreama's side. The hole in her abdomen still oozed blood, though the flow had slowed to a trickle as her body ran dry. Rastin placed his palm directly over the wound, his skin coming into contact with her exposed internal tissues.

The touch sent a jolt of revulsion through Dreama, stronger even than her pain. His hand felt wrong against her wound—cold and somehow greasy, like the skin of a corpse dipped in oil. He began another incantation, and a few moments later green fire bloomed beneath his palm, seeping between his fingers and flowing into Dreama's wound like liquid.

The agony was immediate. If anything, it hurt worse than being stabbed. The green fire burned through her insides, not consuming but transforming. She could feel her torn flesh crawling, writhing, knitting back together under the influence of this cruel form of healing magic as it violated her just as proudly as his cock had. Dreama screamed into her gag again, her back arching until only her head and heels maintained contact with the metal surface. "The necromantic healing process is considerably more painful than Vitalistic healing," Rastin lectured casually as Dreama convulsed beneath his hand. "This is because we are not merely encouraging the body's natural restoration processes… instead, we are commanding dead tissue to live again, forcing a reversal of entropy itself. It is easy enough to do, however."

Through tear-blurred eyes, Dreama watched in horror as the gaping wound in her stomach began to close. She could feel her internal organs squirming back into place, could feel torn blood vessels reconnecting, severed nerves firing with white-hot pain as they reestablished connections. The sensation was like having thousands of insects crawling inside her, burrowing through her tissues, laying eggs beneath her skin. Dreama's vision dimmed as the final stage of healing began. The edges of her wound crawled toward each other like separate living things, flesh reaching for flesh across the diminishing gap. When they met, the sensation was like a thousand needles being driven into her skin simultaneously. A strangled sob escaped her as the last of the visible damage disappeared, leaving only a faint, puckered scar where the knife had entered.

The green fire faded, but its effects lingered in her body—a cold, slithering sensation that made her feel freezing cold on the inside.

"Perfect," Rastin murmured, running his fingers over the fresh scar. "The subject will now be allowed to recover before we harvest her again.”

One of the female apprentice necromancers raised her hand. "Master, how frequently can a single subject be harvested?"

"An excellent question," Rastin replied, finally reaching for his discarded robes. "With proper maintenance, a high-quality subject like this one can be harvested every few days for several months before diminishing returns set in. This one, with her untapped magical potential, may yield prime crystals for perhaps half a year."

Six months. Six months of torture. The words penetrated Dreama's fog of pain and exhaustion. Half a year of this. A year of being cut open, violated, bled, healed, and cut open again. The thought was more devastating than any physical pain could ever be.

"Remember," Rastin continued, gesturing toward Dreama's trembling form, "Weaklings like her are resources, not people. Their suffering is irrelevant except as a catalyst for power. Their only value lies in what we can extract from them."

The apprentices nodded in understanding, some making notes on small parchments they produced from their robes. Several looked at Dreama with calculating eyes, clearly imagining acquiring subjects of their own to harvest.

He turned toward the doorway where the undead guards waited silently. "Return her to her cell. Provide the minimum sustenance required for recovery. No additional damage is permitted until the next scheduled session."

The undead guards unshackled Dreama from the ritual table with rough, jerking movements that sent fresh waves of pain through her newly healed body. The wound had closed, but the memory of it remained etched in her mind, a phantom agony that felt more real than the cold hands gripping her arms. Her body hung limp between them as they dragged her from the chamber, her bare legs trailing uselessly behind her, too weak to support even a fraction of her weight. The stone floor scraped against her skin, leaving raw patches on her knees and the tops of her feet, adding trivial new hurts to her catalog of suffering.

Behind her, Rastin's voice continued to echo from the chamber, lecturing his apprentices on the finer points of necromancy. His words drifted after her like poisonous smoke, seeping into her semiconscious mind despite her desire to block them out.

"The true mastery of death requires understanding that the boundary between living and dead is far more permeable than most believe," he was saying, his cultured voice carrying effortlessly through the stone corridors. "With sufficient power and knowledge, a necromancer can extract life force from subjects miles distant, creating a harvest field that drains entire villages in minutes." The undead guards dragged her around a corner, the necromancer's voice growing fainter but still audible. "Eventually, with enough bloodcrystals and proper ritual preparation, one can even reach across the veil itself to reclaim souls already passed beyond..."

Dreama's head lolled forward, chin resting against her chest as consciousness ebbed and flowed like a tide. Her surroundings blurred past, the carpeted floor, the walls, the stairs. She heard the sound of approaching footsteps. Through swollen eyelids, Dreama glimpsed another group of undead servants of the necromancer approaching from a side passage. Between them they half-carried, half-dragged another prisoner.

Recognition hit her like a physical blow. The Mayor. The same man who had offered her shelter after the fire, whose family had been slaughtered by Rastin. His once-robust frame had been reduced to a gaunt shadow, his gray-streaked beard matted with blood and filth. His body was covered in ritual cuts similar to those Rastin had inflicted on her, some fresh and bleeding, others partially healed into puckered scars.

As their paths crossed, the Mayor's head lifted, and his sunken eyes met hers. A flash of recognition passed between them, a momentary connection in the midst of shared suffering. His cracked lips parted as if he might speak, but no sound emerged. Dreama tried to call out to him, to offer some word of comfort or solidarity, but the gag reduced her attempt to a muffled groan.

Then the moment passed as their respective guards dragged them in opposite directions. Dreama twisted her neck painfully, trying to keep sight of him as long as possible, this last connection to her former life. He disappeared around a corner, and she was alone again among the undead.

The guards resumed their mechanical march toward her cell, their grip on her arms bruising in its uncaring strength. Dreama's head dropped forward again, her momentary alertness fading as exhaustion reclaimed her.

Right before she reached her cell, it happened.

She felt a flare of power… the same kind of cold, frightening power that had woken her from her bed that horrible night. Her entire body convulsed… and she knew why. She could feel the necromancy. Could feel the incredible power flowing through the air. The Mayor was dying. Somehow, impossibly, she knew this with absolute certainty. Not just knew it, but felt it happening, as if she were experiencing it herself. She felt Rastin's magic as it fed off the Mayor’s life and consumed it utterly… tearing, ripping, extracting. The man who had protected her… his life flickered like a candle in a gale, desperately trying to cling to existence even as it was torn away.

Then nothing. Emptiness.

He was gone.

She cried as she was dragged away. The guards showed no reaction to her distress. They continued dragging her forward, turning down a narrower passage that she vaguely recognized from earlier. Her cell waited halfway down to the end, the small stone box that now represented the entirety of her world. When they reached the door, one guard released her arm to unlock it with a screech of rusted hinges. Without ceremony, the two threw her into the cell. Dreama's body hit the filthy floor hard and rolled until she fetched up against the far wall… it didn’t take long. The door slammed shut behind her, locks engaging with metallic finality. Footsteps retreated down the corridor until silence returned, broken only by the sound of her own labored breathing around the gag.

Alone in the darkness, Dreama curled into a fetal position, her body trembling with exhaustion, pain, and grief. The Mayor's death replayed in her mind, that terrible sensation of life being forcibly extracted. She had felt his soul being ripped away. Worse, some part of her had understood how it was done… had glimpsed the mechanism of Rastin's power, the way he manipulated the forces of life and death. The same sparking that had killed her parents and drawn Rastin’s attention meant that she could feel his power and how it was used. The realization should have terrified her further, but instead, a strange calm began to settle over her fractured mind.

If she could feel it, could she use it? If Rastin's violation had opened this door within her, could she turn that against him? The thoughts came unbidden, rising from some primitive part of her brain concerned only with survival and revenge.

Images flashed through her mind… and they were not horrific images of what was going on any longer but fantasies. Dreama imagined standing over Rastin's broken body. Her hands were wreathed in that same blue light she had seen in her blood as she destroyed the necromancer. His apprentices writhing on the floor as she tore their life force away, harvested them as they had intended to harvest her. The gag muffled the sound that escaped her throat, and this time it was not a sob but a laugh. Small, broken, but unmistakable. Her eyes rolled back as consciousness finally slipped away completely, but not before one final thought crystallized in her mind with perfect clarity: She would learn. She would survive. And one day, Rastin would discover exactly what kind of monster he had created.

And then she would bring the people she loved back.

End of chapter 2
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John_F_Drake
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Re: Monsters Aren't Born

Post by John_F_Drake »

The Slaughter

Days passed.

Hunger clawed at Dreama's insides, a gnawing animal that had taken up residence in her gut. She lay curled in the corner of her cell, eyes fixed on the stale bread and cloudy water the undead guards had left for her hours ago, clearing away the uneaten bread and water they had left hours before that. The thought of putting anything in her mouth made her gag, the memories of Rastin's violations still fresh despite the days that had passed. If she closed her eyes, she could still feel his cock forcing its way into her ass, still taste his sweat as he bent over her on the ritual table. The scar on her stomach throbbed, a permanent reminder of the knife that had plunged into her flesh. Her body was a map of pain – throat raw from screaming, joints aching from being manacled to the table, thighs and ass still burning.

Better to starve, she thought. Better to die than endure more of this hell.

How many days had it been now? Three? Four? Time had lost all meaning in the windowless cell, measured only by the deliveries of food she refused to touch and the visits from undead guards who stared at her with empty eyes as they dropped it off.

Dreama's once-golden hair hung in filthy clumps around her face, matted with dirt and sweat. Her skin felt like it belonged to someone else—a stranger whose body had been used as a receptacle for a monster's pleasure, and she wished she could scrub herself hard enough that all of that skin scraped off. Sometimes she caught herself floating above her own form, watching herself curled on the stone floor as if observing someone else's suffering. It was easier that way. Easier to pretend it wasn't happening to her.

The screech of rusty hinges jolted her back to her body. Dreama's eyes snapped toward the door as it swung open, revealing not the vacant stare of an undead guard but the very alive, very cruel gaze of a man. She recognized him immediately – one of Rastin's living followers, a brute with a face marked by a jagged scar running from temple to jaw who oversaw the mindless undead down here. "Still not eating, are you, cunt?" His voice grated against her ears like rough stone. He nudged the untouched tray with his boot. "That's the third meal you've wasted. Master Rastin wants you kept alive. That means you need to eat, bitch."

Dreama pressed herself further into the corner, as if the cold stone might swallow her and provide escape. The man set down a fresh tray, this one containing a new piece of bread and another cup of water. The smell of the bread made her stomach contract painfully, a reminder that despite her wish to die, her body still fought to live.

"Eat," he commanded, standing over her.

She turned her face away, closing her eyes. If she couldn't see him, maybe he'd leave. Maybe he'd just go away and let her die in peace.

The sudden grip on her hair came as a shock despite its predictability. His fist tangled in her matted locks, yanking her head back with enough force to make her gasp. Her eyes flew open as pain lanced across her scalp, tears springing unbidden to their corners.

"If you won't eat this," the man growled, his free hand moving to the front of his trousers, "then you'll eat something else."

Dreama tried to twist away, but her weakened state made resistance futile. Her hands pushed against his thighs as he unfastened his pants, but it was like trying to move a stone wall. The rough fabric scraped against her palms as he exposed himself, his cock already hardening in anticipation. "No," she croaked, her voice a broken whisper from disuse and dehydration. "Please don't—"

He shoved her back against the wall, the impact forcing air from her lungs in a painful rush. Her spine connected with cold, unyielding stone, each vertebra registering the shock separately as they pressed against the rough, uneven surface. His fingers remained tangled in her matted hair, twisting tighter until individual strands began to separate from her scalp with tiny, excruciating bursts of pain that bloomed across her head like lightning. His other hand gripped his member, swollen and with the veins standing out against the shaft like ropes. The head glistened obscenely in the dim light, a drop of clear fluid catching what little illumination filtered into the cell. The smell was foul even by the standards of the unwashed scent of her cell.

"Open your mouth, slut," he commanded, his voice echoing slightly in the stone chamber and bouncing back at them from the damp walls.

Dreama pressed her lips together with what little defiance remained in her broken body, feeling the chapped skin of her upper and lower lips seal against each other. Her jaw muscles tensed, nostrils flaring with each panicked breath as she tried to maintain this small rebellion.

The guard's face darkened, pupils dilating until his eyes were almost black. "Have it your way," he growled, and in one fluid motion, he pulled her head forward by the hair only to slam it backward against the wall.

The impact was catastrophic. Stars exploded behind her eyes like fireworks, white-hot bursts of light against a field of darkness. Pain detonated through her skull, radiating outward from the point of impact in concentric waves. Her brain seemed to slosh inside her skull, momentarily disconnecting her from her body's functions. The room spun wildly, walls and ceiling trading places in a nauseating dance. In that moment of shock and disorientation, her jaw slackened involuntarily, muscles going temporarily slack as her body's systems reset from the trauma. Her lips parted just enough—a fraction of an inch that might as well have been a mile.

The guard seized the opportunity. His thumb and forefinger pinched her jaw painfully, forcing the gap wider as he simultaneously guided his cock toward the opening. The swollen purple head pressed against her lips, hot and insistent, the skin there surprisingly soft despite the hardness beneath.

"Bite me and I'll break your fucking jaw," he hissed. Spittle flew from his mouth as he spoke, tiny droplets landing on her cheeks. "The master keeps you gagged anyway... he'll never know."

The head of his cock pushed past her lips, stretching them around its girth. The taste hit her immediately, an assault on her senses that made her nauseous stomach heave. Unwashed skin carried the sharp tang of accumulated sweat and grime. The taste of him permeated her mouth, coating her tongue like oil and triggering an immediate gag response that she fought desperately to suppress to keep breathing.

Dreama instinctively tried to pull back, her neck muscles straining against his grip. Her head pressed harder against the wall, the rough stone pinning her scalp. There was nowhere for her to go: The implacable stone barrier prevented any retreat. She could only endure as he began to thrust, each forward movement sending the head of his cock deeper into her mouth. Her tongue was quickly pressed flat by his intrusion, his cock pushing it down to make room. She could feel it as every vein, every ridge, every imperfection of his flesh scraped over her tongue.

"Stupid peasant whore," he groaned, his voice changing timbre, dropping lower as lust thickened his words. “Too stupid to even eat to live.” His breathing grew heavier, each exhale carrying a slight moan that reflected his mounting pleasure. He adjusted his position, swapping his grip to twist his fingers in the hair on either side of her head, his thick fingers yanking on her tangled mane. With this new grip he held her head completely immobile, transforming her from a person into an object, just a thing for him to pound into. She could not move her head even a millimeter in any direction as he began to fuck her mouth with increasing force and speed.

Dreama's world contracted, external stimuli fading until nothing existed but the brutal intrusion. Each thrust drove his cock deeper, the head now hitting the soft palate at the back of her mouth. When he pushed particularly hard the tip nudged against the opening of her throat, triggering an immediate and violent gag reflex. Her throat convulsed involuntarily around him, muscles contracting in desperate attempts to expel the foreign object. The spasms squeezed his shaft, creating a rippling sensation that drew a guttural moan from the guard.

Far from deterring him, her body's natural defense mechanism only heightened his arousal. "Too stupid to breathe, too," he groaned. His hips moved faster now, finding a brutal rhythm that allowed no consideration for her comfort or even her ability to get air. Quickly, oxygen became a distant memory. His cock blocked her airway completely when he thrust deep, the shaft sealing her mouth while the head pushed against her throat. Only when he withdrew could she snatch desperate, insufficient gasps, and the opening never lasted for long.

Tears welled in her eyes before spilling down to carve warm tracks in her dirt-smudged cheeks, washing away thin rivulets of grime to reveal the paler skin beneath. The salty moisture mingled with the thick saliva leaking from the corners of her mouth, forming rivulets that ran down her chin and onto her chest. The guard rutted into her face with tireless vigor, his stamina seemingly endless as he took his pleasure from her unwilling body.

The guard's breathing grew more ragged, each exhale punctuated by a grunt or moan. His thrusts became wilder, more frantic. "Going to cum soon, bitch," he panted, the words broken by his labored breathing. His fingers dug even deeper into her skull, surely leaving bruises that would bloom purple and yellow in the coming days… if she lived that long. "Going to make you swallow every—"

His words cut off as his body stiffened. A guttural sound, half-growl and half-moan, tore from his throat as his orgasm overtook him. His cock pulsed violently in her mouth, the head pushing past the entrance to her throat as the first jet of semen erupted from him. The hot, bitter fluid shot directly down her throat, giving her no choice but to swallow. Spurt after spurt followed, each one triggering an involuntary swallowing reflex as her body fought to clear her airway.

He held her head immobile throughout his climax, ensuring she could neither spit nor turn away. Her stomach heaved in protest, threatening to expel the unwanted fluid, but his cock remained lodged too deep, forcing her to accept every drop he produced. Only when the last tremors of his orgasm had subsided did his grip loosen slightly, though not enough to allow her escape.

His eyes, which had closed during the height of his pleasure, opened to regard her with cruel satisfaction, taking in the tears, the saliva, the utter degradation written across her features. "There's your meal," he sneered, giving his cock a final shake that spattered a few more drops onto her face. He kicked the plate full of bread, sending it scattering across the floor. "Next time, eat the fucking bread."

Dreama slumped to the floor as he released her hair, her body curling instinctively into itself. She retched dryly, sending ripples down her already raw throat. The guard tucked himself away, fastening his trousers as he looked down at her with contempt. "The next time I find you haven't eaten," he said, "I’ll be feeding you personally again. And maybe I'll invite some friends to help make sure you get enough in your belly. Understand, cunt?"

She couldn't look at him. Couldn't speak. Could barely breathe through the soreness in her throat and the crushing weight of degradation. But she managed a tiny nod, enough to satisfy him.

"Smart girl," he said. The door clanged shut behind him, the lock engaging with a metallic finality that echoed in the small cell. Dreama remained motionless for long minutes, her breathing shallow, her mind floating somewhere beyond her violated body. Eventually, she dragged herself to the wall, using it to sit upright. With trembling hands, she wiped at the cooling semen on her lips. Then she picked up the dirt-covered roll of bread, staring at it. The thought of putting anything in her mouth made her gag again, but the guard's threat echoed in her mind. Then, forcing herself past the memory of the guard's cock in her mouth, she took a small bite.

—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-

The undead guards came for her at what Dreama guessed was dawn the next day, though no sunlight penetrated the windowless cell to confirm it. Their cold hands gripped her arms with inhuman strength, dragging her from the floor where she'd been curled in fitful sleep. They dragged her through the damp corridor, her bare feet scraping against rough stone. Dreama's legs wouldn't support her weight properly, forcing the undead to bear most of it as they moved. With each step away from her cell, Dreama's awareness of wrongness intensified… a cold, slithering feeling on her skin. It was the feeling of necromancy, she realized. She could sense Rastin's magic before she even saw him.

When they finally reached the ornate door to the ritual chamber, it stood already open. Candlelight spilled into the hallway, along with the murmur of voices—Rastin, still lecturing to his apprentices. The undead guards dragged her across the threshold and into the now-familiar room with its metal table and concentric circles of black candles. The faces of a dozen robed figures turned toward her, their expressions ranging from clinical curiosity to undisguised lust and eagerness.

"Ah, our guest of honor has arrived," Rastin announced, his cultured voice slicing through Dreama's terror like a blade. He stood at the head of the circle, holding up a bloodcrystal… no, her bloodcrystal. She could feel it. … feel that it belonged to her. "As I was explaining, once a bloodcrystal grows strong enough, it can serve some other interesting functions for us. First, we’ll have to start by enhancing the crystal's potency."

The undead guards hauled Dreama to the table and lifted her onto it, the cold metal shocking against her bare skin. Her limbs were wrenched outward as they secured her wrists and ankles into the iron manacles, leaving her bound once again before the watching apprentices. Rastin approached the table, and his fingers traced the puckered scar on her abdomen, the touch sending revulsion cascading through Dreama's body. She twisted weakly against the restraints, earning nothing but the bite of metal against her raw wrists.

"Today we'll be harvesting again from the same subject," Rastin continued, producing his ritual dagger from within his robes. The blade was almost orange in the reflected candlelight. “Anyone’s blood will do to help grow it, but for the sake of making it larger and stronger as quickly as possible, we’re going to use the sorcerer’s blood again."

Without warning, he plunged the dagger into her scar. Dreama screamed into her gag as the blade tore through barely-healed tissue, reopening the wound. The pain was no less intense for being familiar—white-hot agony radiating outward from the point of entry, consuming her awareness. Blood welled immediately, flowing from the wound in a steady stream. Through tear-blurred eyes, Dreama saw her own blood flowing into the channels carved into the table. Quickly, the necromancer began a familiar incantation, his voice dropping to a resonant chant that seemed to vibrate in Dreama's bones. The syllables cut the air like knives, each word making her wound throb with increasing intensity. As before, her blood began to rise from the collection channels, defying gravity to hover above the table in a rotating sphere.

He held up the small crystal from earlier, now placing it within the floating sphere of Dreama's blood. The crystal seemed to drink in the crimson fluid, pulsing brighter with each moment. Dreama felt each pulse as a corresponding squeeze around her heart, as if the crystal were connected to her very core. When the sphere vanished, the crystal was larger than before. A commotion at the door drew her attention away from the floating orb. Two more undead guards entered the room, dragging between them a struggling woman. Dreama's heart stopped when she recognized the newcomer: Marla, the baker's wife, whose plump, flour-dusted hands had slipped extra sweet rolls into Dreama's basket every market day since she was a child.

"Please!" Marla sobbed, her once-round face now gaunt with captivity. "Please don't hurt me! I have children!"

"Bring her closer," Rastin commanded, unmoved by the woman's pleas. The undead guards positioned Marla beside the table, forcing her to her knees directly in Dreama's line of sight. He took several steps toward one of his apprentices and handed her the crystal. “Hold this,” he said. Then he turned his attention back to the new woman, walking towards her.

Dreama strained against her restraints, but no one paid any attention to her. In a movement too swift to track, Rastin stepped behind the kneeling woman and drew his dagger across her throat in one smooth slash. Blood fountained from the severed arteries, spraying across the floor in a crimson arc. Marla's words transformed into a wet gurgle as she clutched at her neck, blood pouring between her fingers as she collapsed forward.

Dreama screamed, the sound tearing from her throat with enough force to make it bleed. She thrashed against the restraints, no longer feeling the pain of her own wounds as she watched Marla's life drain away before her eyes.

But what happened next made her screams die in her throat. As Marla's body convulsed in its final moments, Dreama felt something impossible… she felt her life energy fleeing from the dying woman’s body. And… and it felt like she was reaching out for it. She could see nothing, but she felt it as tendrils of energy reached out from the gemstone, heading towards the dying woman. The crystal pulsed softly as the woman died, blinking in time with the slowing beat of Marla’s heart. Then the woman lay still in a widening pool of her own blood… and the crystal had grown larger again.

“So, what did we just see?" Rastin asked, walking back to pick up the enlarged crystal from his apprentice’s hand. “Once a bloodcrystal grows strong enough, it no longer needs your help to gather additional energy. No ritual or anything like that. A crystal this size can absorb the energies from any death within, oh, perhaps thirty yards or so. The distance increases exponentially with the size of the crystal.”

Dreama barely heard him through the roaring in her ears. Marla's death played on repeat in her mind: The slash of the knife, the fountain of blood, the light fading from kind eyes that had always crinkled at the corners when she smiled. Another death she had caused, simply by existing. Simply by being valuable to the monster who used them all as resources.

“With proper planning, you can store a great deal of power and trap it inside the bloodcrystal, keeping it to use as you see fit.” Rastin shrugged. “The application, I think, should be obvious. Simply killing a large number of people to empower a potent spell is often impracticable. However, letting them die one by one and storing the power as you go... that is far easier. Waste not, want not, after all.”

Many of the apprentices laughed as he ran his palm over Dreama's wound. The now-familiar green fire bloomed beneath his hand, seeping into her torn flesh with excruciating slowness. The pain came again, and when he removed his hand again the cut was gone but the scar was even more prominent than before. "Return her to her cell," he ordered the undead guards. "We'll allow four days for recovery before the next extraction. We’ll see how strong we can make this crystal before we let her perish."

As the guards dragged her from the table, Dreama's gaze remained fixed on Marla's lifeless body, left in a heap on the floor like discarded trash. Another death on her conscience. Another soul sacrificed because of what she was. The guilt was a physical weight, pressing down on her chest until she could barely breathe.

—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-

Weeks passed… or months.

Dreama couldn’t be sure.

The only thing she had to keep track of time was how many times Rastin had brought her out to harvest her blood. Six times since Marla’s death he had cut her open. Six more times he had drained her blood to create his crystals. Several of those times, he had violated her, using her pain to fuel his power. The cut was still a fresh scar, pink and tender… a raised line that throbbed in rhythm with her heartbeat as she lay on the cold stone floor of her cell. How many more times would he cut her? How much more could her body endure before it simply gave out, empty of blood and life and everything that made her human?

However long it had been, her once-healthy frame had grown gaunt, ribs visible beneath stretched skin like the ridges of a washboard. Hollow cheeks and sunken eyes gave her face a skull-like appearance, accentuated by the dull, matted hair that hung in limp strands around her face. The only food she received was the bare minimum needed to keep her alive, and even that stuck in her throat, each swallow a struggle against the memory of the guard's cock forcing its way down her gullet. As her body weakened, something else had grown stronger, though. Dreama felt the magic everywhere now, a strange awareness prickling at the edges of her consciousness. Ever since Marla’s death, the ability had sharpened with each harvesting session. Now she could feel the cold, slithering presence of necromancy even through the thick walls of her cell. She could sense when Rastin was working his spells elsewhere in the complex, could feel the moment another prisoner's life was extinguished, their energy harvested and condensed into that awful crystal.

Her crystal. That was how she could feel it, she felt certain… that crystal was tied to her, and through it she could sense everything.

The shuffling footsteps of undead guards approached her cell. Dreama didn't bother to sit up. The guards cared nothing for her dignity or comfort or her nudity… they were merely animated tools, performing the tasks assigned to them with mindless obedience. The door hinges squealed in protest as the first guard pushed it open, the sound setting Dreama's teeth on edge.

Something snapped—a metallic crack followed by the sound of something small hitting the stone floor near the entrance to her cell.

One of the guards paused, its vacant eyes dropping down to the floor… but after a moment of apparent confusion, it simply continued with its task. The second guard placed a tray on the floor—the usual meager rations of stale bread and cloudy water—before both backed out of the cell without a word. The door slammed shut with more force than usual.

When their shuffling footsteps had receded into silence, Dreama finally raised her head. Her gaze immediately went to the spot where she'd heard the object fall. There, glinting dully in the faint light that filtered through the small barred window of her cell, lay a thick metal pin. Dreama stared at it for a long moment, not quite sure what she was seeing. The door, she realized, was leaning inward from the top… one of the neglected door hinges had snapped under the guard's rough handling. Slowly, painfully, she dragged herself across the floor, her weakened muscles protesting every inch. When her fingers closed around the cold metal, a strange sound escaped her lips—something between a laugh and a sob. For the first time since her capture, she held something that might serve as a weapon.

She could kill herself with this.

One quick jab to the throat or wrist, and this nightmare would end. The pin wasn't particularly sharp, but it was sharp enough with some force. She could be dead before the necromancer showed up to heal the wound… and then Dreama could finally escape the pain, the violation, the endless cycle of torture and partial recovery. She pressed the dull point against her wrist, feeling the cold metal dimple her skin. It would hurt… but what was one final pain compared to the endless suffering that awaited her at Rastin's hands? Just a quick, hard push, and then...

The image of Rastin's smug face floated in her mind, his pale eyes gleaming with satisfaction at another successful harvest. If she died now, he would simply find another victim. Another girl with magical potential to cut open and drain. She remembered her mother. She remembered her father. She remembered the kind mayor and his family, and Marla and her bread, and all the villagers she had lived with. All of them dead… because of her.

"No," Dreama whispered, her voice a rasp from disuse. "Not like this."

She lowered the pin from her wrist and turned her gaze to the damaged door hinge. With one pin missing and the door hanging slightly askew, the remaining two hinges were bearing more weight than they were designed to support. If she could weaken or remove another...

The thought of escape had seemed so impossible that she hadn't even considered it until this moment. But now, with the pin clutched in her trembling fingers, a wild hope began to bloom in her chest. She wouldn't die in this cell. She would either escape or force them to kill her trying.

Dragging herself to the door took all her remaining strength. The cell's dimensions had never seemed so vast as they did now, when every movement sent fresh pain shooting through her harvested body. But anger fueled her where physical strength failed. Anger at Rastin for his cold cruelty, at the guard who had violated her, at the undead servants who dragged her to the ritual chamber again and again, at a world that had allowed her to fall into this hell.

By the time she reached the door, sweat coated her skin despite the cell's chill. The pin in her hand was crude and not well-suited for the task of breaking through metal, but it was all she had. At least the metal was well-rusted and weakened. Gritting her teeth, Dreama began to work at the hinge, scraping and prying with desperate determination.

The noise of metal scraping against metal was horrific and it echoed in the silent corridor beyond her cell. Each sound made her flinch, certain it would bring guards running to investigate. Her fingers cramped around the pin, knuckles white with effort as she worked it into the hinge mechanism. Blood welled from beneath her fingernails, adding to the countless injuries that marked her body. Still she continued, driven by the wild hope of freedom or the grim satisfaction of dying on her own terms.

Minutes stretched into hours. Her arm burned from the awkward angle, her shoulder socket screaming in protest. The skin of her forearm was scraped raw where it pressed against the rough edge of the door. It was still loud… but somehow no one came to investigate the noise. The absence of response was almost more frightening than being caught would have been… the lingering tension as she expected something to happen weighing on her psyche. Her fingers felt like they were going to fall off with her exhaustion, so to motivate herself she imagined each scrape of metal as a wound inflicted on Rastin's flesh. In her mind's eye, she saw herself driving the pin into his pale eyes, twisting it deep into his brain. She imagined tearing open his chest and ripping out his heart, just as he had torn open her body again and again. The violent images should have horrified her… the gentle farm girl she had once been would never have contemplated such brutality. Now they brought only grim satisfaction.

Something gave way under her assault—a small shift, followed by a groan of stressed metal. The second hinge was weakening. Dreama redoubled her efforts, ignoring the fresh blood trickling down her arm and the tremors wracking her exhausted muscles. Just a little more. Just a little longer.

With a sudden crack that sounded impossibly loud in the confined space, the second hinge snapped. The door sagged dramatically, now supported only by the bottom hinge. Dreama fell back, panting, as the full weight of the door pulled against its last remaining support. For several heartbeats, nothing happened. Then, with a groan of protesting metal, the final hinge tore free from its moorings. Then the heavy metal door toppled inward and Dreama scrambled backward to avoid being crushed, her heart hammering against her ribs.

The door smashed into the stone with a tremendous crash that surely must have been heard throughout the entire complex. No one could have missed that… guards would come running at any moment. She pressed herself against the wall, clutching the blood-slick pin like a dagger, prepared to fight or die.

But the seconds ticked by, and no one came.

No shuffling footsteps of undead guards, no shouts of alarm from living overseers. No talking. No slamming doors. There was nothing but the same oppressive silence that had filled the corridors since her arrival. The lack of response was so unexpected that Dreama wondered briefly if she had finally lost her mind—if the crash had happened only in her imagination, the product of a mind fractured by trauma and starvation. But no… the door lay broken on the cell floor, the path to the corridor now completely unobstructed. Freedom beckoned, terrifying in its sudden possibility. Dreama stared at the open doorway, hardly daring to believe what she was seeing. After weeks of hopelessness, of resignation to her fate, the world had cracked open to reveal a chance she had never expected to receive.

Taking a deep, shuddering breath, Dreama clutched her makeshift weapon and prepared to rise. Whatever awaited her beyond that doorway—escape or death—it had to be better than remaining Rastin's willing sacrifice.

And she froze as she reached the threshold of her cell, legs trembling beneath her as she stared at the undead man standing just a few feet away and staring at her. It had been here the whole time, but it had done nothing to stop her… and it wasn’t moving now, either. It just stood there like a grotesque statue, vacant eyes staring at nothing, jaws slack, hands hanging at their sides. The wrongness of it sent shivers down her spine. These same creatures had dragged her to torture sessions, had watched impassively as Rastin cut her open again and again. Now they seemed as lifeless as the truly dead, despite remaining upright. Dreama swallowed hard, her throat clicking with dryness as she took her first uncertain step toward freedom.

Her bare foot touched the stone floor of the corridor. Nothing happened. The guard remained motionless, not even their eyes tracking her movement. Dreama's heart hammered in her chest, each beat painful against her protruding ribs. She clutched the metal pin tighter, its sharp edges digging into her palm.

Emboldened by their continued inaction, she waved a hand in front of the nearest guard's face. The corpse—once a middle-aged farmer whose pigs had often broken into her family's garden and whom her father had always complained about but never failed to share a meal with—didn't blink, didn't flinch, didn't react at all. Its eyes remained fixed on the door she had come through, milky and unseeing.

"Why aren't you stopping me?" she whispered, her voice strange to her own ears after so long in silence.

No answer came, of course. Just the soft, wet sound of air passing through dead lungs that no longer needed to breathe. Dreama reached out, her hand hovering inches from the guard's cold flesh before she jerked it back, unwilling to actually touch the animated corpse.

They must only follow specific orders. The entire time she had been here, they only did precisely what they were instructed to. Some instinct told her that these beings only followed specific orders. Without instructions from Rastin or his living overseers, they were nothing but empty shells—no will, no initiative, no purpose. The realization sent a thrill of hope through her exhausted body. If she could avoid the living followers, maybe… maybe she could navigate through the complex unhindered.

Gathering what little strength remained in her wasted body, Dreama began moving down the corridor, giving the undead guard a wide berth. Every step sent pain shooting through her scraped feet and her muscles cramped horribly from weeks of disuse, but she pressed one hand against the wall for support and kept going. The first cell she passed was empty, its door shut. Dark stains marked the floor, long since dried to a dull brown that could only be blood. One of her fellow townfolk had been in there when she was dragged past before… but he was gone now. Dreama moved on, checking each cell as she passed. Empty. Empty. Empty. Empty. All of them were gone.

Where were the other captives? Dreama remembered seeing dozens of villagers taken that night—men, women, even children. All of them were gone now, their cells empty save for bloodstains and silence. The sixth cell contained a small, pathetic pile of cloth in one corner. Dreama recognized it immediately—a child's doll, crudely sewn from scraps of fabric, now filthy and abandoned. Little Anna's doll. The baker's daughter had clutched it to her chest the night they were taken, her small face wet with tears as she clung to her mother, Marla. The same mother Dreama had watched die while she laid on Rastin's table. A sob tore from her throat before she could stifle it, the sound echoing in the empty corridor.

Anna was gone now, too.

Cell after cell told the same story, the smell and detritus of captivity and a hollow emptiness. As Dreama moved deeper into the dungeon, a terrible understanding began to take shape in her mind. She was the only one left. The only prisoner Rastin had kept alive. Everyone else from her village had been sacrificed to fuel his necromancy, their lives harvested and fed to that bloodcrystal, and their bodies discarded like empty husks. Only she remained… her magical potential too valuable to waste so quickly.

They were all dead.

The realization sent a wave of dizziness washing over her. Dreama sagged against the wall, her legs threatening to give way beneath her. Guilt crushed down on her chest with physical weight—guilt at surviving when everyone else had perished. Guilt at being special when specialness meant continued torture rather than merciful death. "I'm sorry," she whispered to the empty cells, to the ghosts of those who had died while she lived. "I'm so sorry."

Then she pushed herself upright, forcing her trembling legs to support her weight. Sorrow wouldn't save her, and guilt wouldn't honor their deaths. She had to keep moving.

At the end of the cellblock, a heavy wooden door stood partially ajar, revealing a narrow staircase leading upward. Dreama hesitated, straining her senses for any sign of danger. The cold, slithering sensation of necromancy still lingered in the air, but it felt distant, unfocused: Ambient energy rather than active spellcasting.

Dreama continued up the stairs, each step a struggle against her weakened body. Halfway up, she heard a sound that made her blood freeze in her veins—the shuffling gait of undead guards approaching from a connecting passage. She pressed herself against the wall, trying to make her emaciated frame as small as possible as two animated corpses trudged past the foot of the stairs, unseeing eyes fixed ahead. They carried between them a bucket of water… something to scrub and clean with, perhaps?

Neither noticed her.

When they had passed, Dreama released the breath she'd been holding, her head spinning. At the top of the stairs, she paused to gather her strength and her courage. Beyond this point would be the more populated areas of the complex—Rastin's chambers, the rooms where his living followers dwelled, the terrible ritual space where she had been violated repeatedly. The danger would increase exponentially… yet the complex remained as silent as a tomb.

Dreama clutched her metal pin, now slick with blood from her clenched fist. It was a pathetic weapon against the horrors that might await her, but it was all she had. Then she left the stairs and rounded the corner… and almost tripped over the body of a man.

He was sprawled on the floor, arms and legs splayed at unnatural angles. The living overseer… the same one who watched the dungeons, the one who had forced his cock down her throat, was lying on the ground. She didn’t need to check to see that he was dead. His eyes were open, bulging from their sockets as if he had died in shock or terror. His outstretched hand seemed to reach for something beyond Dreama's sight, fingers curved like claws digging into the stone floor. No visible wounds marked his body, yet the twisted expression on his face told of an agonizing death. Dreama couldn't summon even a flicker of pity.

She edged past the corpse, giving it a wide berth despite knowing it posed no threat. Unlike Rastin's undead servants, this body showed no sign of animation. Had Rastin killed him? Had the necromancer gotten angry and ripped the life from the man? If so, why hadn’t he resurrected him into one of his undead slaves like the others? Why had he been left here on the floor? The body was actually starting to smell… he hadn’t been here for just a few moments.

Weeks ago, Dreama would have been so revolted she couldn’t function. The sight of a dead body would have crippled her. Now, after the horror she had witnesses, she just felt numb… and confused. What was going on here?

She continued down the corridor, alert for any sign of living threats. The complex felt wrong… too quiet. Something catastrophic had happened here.

Around the next corner, she found two more bodies—apprentices she recognized from her torture sessions, both lying face down as if they'd been running when death caught them. Once again, neither of them had a wound. One still clutched a bloodcrystal in his rigid hand, the gem's inner light now extinguished and dull.

Dreama could have run then. There was a window in the hallway, and it wasn’t that far to the ground. She could probably lower herself, fall, hit the ground, run for her life. She didn’t. Something was pulling her onward… some compulsion to move forward. More bodies lay scattered through the halls as she walked. Some had died in their open rooms, contorted in positions that suggested their final moments had been excruciating. Others appeared to have been fleeing, cut down mid-stride. A female apprentice who had particularly enjoyed watching Dreama's violations was slumped against a wall, her pretty face now a mask of horror, her robes torn as if she'd clawed at her own chest in her death throes.

It wasn’t until she stood before the door that she realized where she had been walking: Dreama stood outside of the door leading to the ritual chambers where she had been drained. Where the lessons were taught. The ornate door stood partially open. She put her hand on the door and felt it… a rhythmic pulsing, almost like a heartbeat.

She pushed.

The sight that greeted her on the other side of that door stopped her cold. The ritual chamber had become a charnel house. Bodies of apprentices lay scattered across the floor in pools of black fluid, their faces frozen in expressions of unspeakable agony. Some had apparently tried to form a protective circle around the central table, while others had attempted to flee, only to collapse before reaching the door. That was bad enough… but it was the figure on the central table that drew Dreama's horrified gaze. Rastin himself lay spread-eagled where she had been bound so many times, his expensive robes torn open to expose his chest. Or rather, what remained of it. His ribcage had been split open from the inside, bones splayed outward like the petals of some grotesque flower. The cavity where his heart should have been gaped empty, the surrounding tissue blackened and withered as if burned by some caustic substance.

Dreama approached the table slowly, unable to tear her eyes from the necromancer's mutilated corpse. His face was contorted in an expression of such pure terror that it barely looked human anymore. The eyes that had watched her suffering with cold amusement were now wide and glassy, fixed on the ceiling in eternal horror. Black fluid had poured from every orifice—eyes, ears, nose, mouth—creating a dark halo around his head on the metal table.

"What happened?" she whispered, not expecting an answer from the dead. "Who… what… did this?"

As if in response, the pulsing sensation she'd felt earlier intensified, drawing her attention to Rastin's robes. Something bulged in an inner pocket, creating a small, rhythmic movement that mimicked a heartbeat. Dreama hesitated, revulsion warring with curiosity. Then, steeling herself, she reached into the pocket with trembling fingers.

Her hand closed around something warm and solid. The crystal was nearly the size of a small plum. When she pulled it free, her breath caught in her throat. The crystal pulsed with crimson light that matched the rhythm she'd been sensing, each throb perfectly synchronized with her own heartbeat. Veins of silver-blue energy swirled within it, dancing around the central red glow in hypnotic patterns.

It was hers. This was the crystal she had bled for. The one that so many souls had been fed to. It had grown large, enhanced with the death energy of her fellow villagers. Rastin had kept it close, using it to fuel his most powerful spells. Now it responded to her presence like it recognized her as its like, and the warmth of the power contained inside the crystal ran up her arm and throughout her body.

Someone had killed them all. They hadn’t taken anything, like bandits would have. They hadn’t slain the undead automatons like one of the churches or kingdom enforcers would have. They hadn’t stayed behind like a conquering rival would have. Whoever had done this had just slaughtered everyone here like they were insects and left without a second’s hesitation… they hadn’t even checked the dungeons to realize there was a captive left alive.

What if they came back?

Dreama didn’t know where she found the strength to run, but ran she did. If she had been walking through this nightmare like she was enchanted, that enchantment was broken now… she fled in a panic, seeking the quickest way out. She didn’t know the way, but she picked directions more or less at random until she found a door, opened it, and stepped outside into a courtyard near the forest. Dreama hesitated at the threshold, momentarily overwhelmed by the sight of the outside world after weeks of captivity. The air smelled of pine and damp earth, so sweet after the stench of death and decay that it brought tears to her eyes.

Then she resumed running, and she did not look back.

Panic propelled her forward, bare feet flying over the rough path despite her weakness. She clutched the crystal to her chest as she ran, its warmth the only defense against the chill that the forest inflicted on the naked girl sprinting through it. Branches whipped at her face and naked body, reopening half-healed wounds and creating new ones, but Dreama didn't slow. The pain was distant, irrelevant compared to the primal fear driving her deeper into the forest. She ran until her legs gave out, collapsing in a small clearing far from the necromancer's complex. Blood trickled from dozens of small cuts, her feet torn and bleeding from the punishing flight. But she was free. Whatever had slaughtered the house hadn't noticed her… or if it had, it had chosen not to claim her as it had claimed Rastin and his followers.

Dreama lay on the damp forest floor, gasping for breath, the crystal still clutched to her chest. Its pulsing had slowed to match her heartbeat once more, a comforting rhythm that anchored her to the present moment. She was alive. Broken, traumatized, forever changed—but alive.

There, in that clearing, Dreama finally allowed herself to weep. Not the silent tears of captivity, but deep, wrenching sobs that tore from her throat and shook her entire body. She cried for her parents, burned in the fire her magic had created. For the villagers sacrificed to Rastin's ambition. For Marla, whose kind face had been the last thing Dreama saw before the knife took her life. For the child with the doll, whose blood had stained a cell floor. For the self she had been before—innocent, untested, unbroken.

When the tears finally subsided, a new emotion rose to take their place—determination, cold and hard as the crystal in her hand. She had survived when all others had perished. That had to mean something. Whatever power had drawn her to the crystal, she would understand it. Master it. Use it.

And then, perhaps, find a way to bring back those she had lost.

End of chapter 3
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