Page 11 of Terragnata and the Heir of the Earth

“You have some memories trapped in your mind that we need to free, and I can do that through the cleansing. It will make sense after. I promise,” the silver-haired woman replied.

I remembered an account of Lahar healers using hypnosis to help trauma survivors recall repressed events. Many cases did not end well, with more than one instance reported of the patient clawing their own eyes out.

Didn’t seem ideal.

“Afterwards, you will let me go?”

The leader exhaled. “If that is your wish.”

“Will it hurt?” My words were whispers that seemed to echo through the forest clearing.

I didn’t need to see Ezren’s searing stare to feel his eyes on me.

“Yes,” the leader Jana replied. “I will do my best to be gentle and to block your nerve endings from pain. But memory recovery and magic emancipation are no simple tasks, especially when the memories and magic have been buried for as long as yours have.”

Magic. Magic was a fantastical concept, a tool for conceptual metaphor in storytelling. It was also the creed by which some religious fanatics claimed to live. We had a group on the outskirts of Argention, necromancers, or Deathspitters we called them. From what I’d heard, they fed off small mushrooms that grew into late winter and made minds turn mad. No one took them seriously.

Maybe these were a different breed of religious enthusiasts. The cleansing sounded an awful lot like a cultish purification ceremony. Something to scare children. I pulled on my chains once more in a futile attempt to improve my position. “Please, just let me go,” I whispered, wincing at the pitiful sound of my words. “I am no one. I’ve done nothing.”

Jana exhaled. “Terra, only half of that statement is true. I cannot explain the rest unless you let me help you. Please, let me help you.” Her words floated over me, casting a warm stream of sunlight. I felt my resistance lighten as if a weight lifted from my chest, agreeableness its replacement. Agreeableness, along with the knowledge I wasn’t going anywhere before they finished performing whatever the cleansing was.

I pressed my eyelids together, defeated, a numbness sinking into my skin. Whatever it was couldn’t be worse than waking up and remembering the life leave my mother’s eyes.

I could live a hundred lifetimes and never forget that image.

“Just get it over with.”

They removed my chains, which, according to the older female, were silver and thus… magic dampeners. Whatever that meant. I considered attempting another run for it, but my body clung to the ground, leaden and heavy, sucked dry of any energy.

“Terra, we’ll have to hold you down with our own hands. I cannot use the chains, and I have no rope with me. Do you understand?” Jana asked.

I understood that I smelled like piss, blood, and dirt, and was about to have strangers’ hands all over me.Not the first time I’ve been violated this week.I remembered the blue-eyed man leering at my naked body. Doing something I could not comprehend, but knew was inappropriately intimate.

Some small, broken part of me hoped it would hurt.

That it would wipe away the stain of the past few days from my skin, my soul. That it would be more painful than the painI’d just awoken to, if only to give me some small reprieve from the crushing loss settled on my chest, threatening to swallow me whole. I begged for a distraction.

“Fine.” Small tears escaped down my face, pooling in the creases of my mouth.

Two women, one young and one middle-aged, took each of my wrists, pinning them down with all their weight. Two men did the same with my ankles. Jana folded her legs on each side of my head, framing it, her knees light touches on my shoulders, a palm cupping my cheek.

“Your power, your magic, rests in here dear,” she said, placing the other hand on her own gut. “Right now, yours is hibernating, shall we say. Someone made it very comfortable there, like a bear in perpetual mid-winter. It will not want to come out and willcertainlynot want your mind to be cleansed. Though the pain will likely be in your head, most of yourfightwill come from there,” she said, gesturing to my torso. “Ezren will hold your abdomen down, is that alright?”

“If I said no, would you let me go?” I let out a humorless chuckle, knowing the answer before I spoke.

Jana sighed. “What I meant was, well I just meant, I could have one of the females switch positions with him, if it bothers you to have a male?—”

“Just please get it over with,” I whispered, my eyes still shut, tears creeping out of them. A pair of knees settle somewhere between my parted legs with what sounded like a pained breath. I hoped it was Ezren struggling to breathe due to a cracked rib of my doing. The thought made a ghost of a smile caress my mind.

Warm hands pressed on my lower belly, sending a new terrifying jolt through me. I blinked my eyes open again, and it took a moment for the welled-up moisture to clear. His flaming green stare loomed just a foot away from mine. He looked scaredtoo, which, though strange, comforted me… as if I was not alone in my fear.

Jana began. She first rubbed my temples. After a minute of massaging, she pulled her hands out and away from my head, tenting her fingers like something still invisibly connected them to the temples they had touched. Then her energy became chaotic. One moment she swirled her fingers in the dirt beside me, another moment she chanted with her arms open. Another I felt her hands on my scalp. I almost laughed aloud at the insanity of it all, but the pain soon came.

When I was fourteen and fell off the thick curling branch of an ancient oak thirty feet above the ground, I thought I had known pain. I shattered nearly my entire ribcage. The healer was shocked I’d lived. I thought I knew pain when my brother Javis dropped a boulder on my hand, or when father didn’t come home for three days following a mining accident, or when I saw Mama’s body slump to the floor of our cottage.

But I had not known pain like this.

Pain that made my body turn white hot. No build-up, no crying, or whimpering, just searing hot pain that made my body want to contort, sweat, scream. It felt like she was taking a man’s dulled shaving razor and using it to scrape out every corner of my head. Every nerve ending I possessed mirrored the pain, culminating in my gut, as if to highlight how my mind was ultimately connected to it all.

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