“I wish I could say I was sorry,” she offered.
“You’ve never been sorry about anything in your life.”
A half-smile tugged at the corner of her lip. “It’s a useless emotion.”
“Why would you do it?” he asked with a sigh.
“You know why.”
“I truly don’t.”
Her expression faded. “She was worth it, sir.”
He made a face of disdain and mocked her. “‘She was worth it’– do you hear yourself?”
“Lately, I haven’t had anybody else to talk to. I’m getting pretty sick of hearing myself, actually.”
“Evasion. A classic Lucidia move.”
She remained silent.
“You think you’re so noble, don’t you?” he asked. “I thought I taught you better than that.”
“You did,” she said. “I’m a slow learner.”
“Do you not care about anybody but yourself?” he roared.
Adonis’s response brought waves of anger forth, and Lucidia felt her shoulders tense in place. SShe scowled at him.
“What do you think it’s like, seeing you betray everything we work for?” he continued. “Do you think it’s fair for you to sit there, smiling to yourself, proud of your actions?”
“Nothing about this is fair,” Lucidia muttered.
“You’re correct. It isn’t fair for your family to have to watch you destroy yourself.”
“But you’re not!” she snapped. Her voice had gone shrill, and for a moment, it sounded foreign. “You’re not my family. The only true family I had is locked up in Darian’s prison, and I’m on my way to see him now.”
The last time that Lucidia Draxos had had an emotional outburst was when she was twelve years old, and Paula Hyxos had taken her crossbow and used it for firewood.
Lucidia had screamed, loud enough to piss off Darian’s hypersensitive ears, and she had used a smoldering piece of wood to beat Paula’s face in. She still remembered the smell of her own hand, blistered and burnt from the red-hot log (though Paula’s face had gotten the bad end of the deal).
When Adonis had spoken to her about the incident, she thought he would be mad. She thought he’d hit her – not in a hateful, sadistic way, but in the way that every strongblood was raised. Forged by the fight: that was their motto. Training supervisors found that a good thwap on the head was often the prescription for a variety of ailments, and from Lucidia’s personal experience, they were often correct.
Crying? Thwap. Yelling? Thwap. Taking a cookie from the forbidden jar? Thwap.
But in the case of Paula’s surprise makeover, Adonis had not sought the usual punishment.
Instead, he’d looked her straight in the eyes, and said, “Strong people don’t scream. They don’t get mad on the outside, and they don’t beat people up because they feel like it. Strong people know how to control their emotions. What you did to Paula showed weakness to everybody in this castle. You are not a weak person, are you, Lucidia? Because if this keeps happening, that’s what they’ll think.”
She remembered her eyes going wide, and the frantic, child-like way she shook her head.
Lucidia was stubborn, but not stupid. Somehow, Adonis always knew how to explain things in a way that made her agree. He didn’t spend countless hours trying to beat down the door of her eternal resolve; rather, he went in the side window of logical appeal.
She didn’t want to be weak.
She didn’t want Adonis to think she was weak. Nor Kenzo. Nor, in that time, Master Darian.
On that day, she’d turned herself into stone. Not all the way through – she still had plenty of emotions swirling around inside of her. But she’d chosen to keep them there.
Until today.
Because there was only so much you could keep hidden, with proper motivation. Her motivation had been to garner the utmost respect that a strongblood slave could possibly get; notoriety, fear, power. And now, that motivation had been squandered, and she just didn’t care to keep up pretenses.
It was new territory, this strange expressive person that had come brimming to the top with only a moment’s notice.
How long have you been there, hanging under the surface? she thought.
Adonis gave her that look of sorrow; his sad, pitying look.
She shook her head and a bitter, venomous smile spread onto her lips. “Nothing to say?”
His reply was quiet. “You’re not going to Kenzo.”
“I doubt Darian would make us cell-buddies.”
“No,” he repeated, his eyes downcast. “You’re not going to Master Darian’s prison.”
She narrowed her eyes.
“He’s giving you to the Guild of Casters.”
Lucidia had to repeat his response in her head, just to make sure she’d understood the meaning correctly. She stiffened as she realized that he meant it.
Those three little words, Guild of Casters, had changed her situation completely.
It’s one thing to have nothing to lose. But even when you have nothing to lose, you can still have things to avoid at all costs.
Because no matter how hard her situation was, she’d rather be on the run forever than spend one day with the guild casters.
Darian would have tortured her; he would have used everything she’d ever cared about against her and beaten her until her soul was an even more condensed ball of coal, until the only thing keeping her alive was hatred and agony and a stubborn heartbeat. But even then, at least she would have been Lucidia through and through.
People that go to casters’ guild don’t get that luxury.
It was one of the most severe punishments that had ever existed in their world. Casters, as it were, are very, very curious beings. Curious beings that have a god complex.
In short, they liked to experiment.
The casters’ guild was a place where creatures were sent so that sorcerers could play around and test the limits of existence. A person goes in and something else comes out, if anything comes out at all. Take a left past ‘natural’, keep going for an hour or so, and you still haven’t made it to the horrors that crawl out of their lab.
Of course, they did it in the name of discovery. It was that kind of brutal experimentation, trial, and error that
