Page 84 of Devoured
“Your medical training. Your rationality. Your careful distance from the horror you helped maintain. All useless here,”the Judge said.
He began with her mind before touching her body. Every patient she’d sewn back together just so they could be broken again played out in her head. The faces of women she’d bandaged, knowing they’d return tomorrow with fresh wounds. Her clinical detachment that allowed the torture to continue—so long as the paperwork was filed.
I watched her composure crack as the weight of her complicity crashed down.
Then he began on her body.
Fingernails peeled back one by one. Each finger broken with a cracking sound. Her ribs broke like kindling while she remained conscious for every splinter. The skinning came last—strips of flesh pulled away while servants caught them in silver bowls.
When she finally crumbled to ash, we remained frozen, forced to watch every particle scatter.
“Next,”he commanded.
Marion tried to shrink back, but invisible hands dragged her forward. He lifted her like she weighed nothing.
“The survivor. How many times you’ve escaped death. Let’s fix that,”he mused.
Her clothes vanished.
He wrapped her legs in chains that cut to the bone, then peeled her skin from thigh to ankle in perfect spirals. Acid on the exposed muscle made it bubble, eating through fibers while Marion’s screams turned inhuman. He crushed every bone in her feet, ground her ankles to powder, and dismantled her knees until they were only meat and fragments.
Between tortures came visions: her daughter Emma calling for her. The child’s voice echoed through the chamber, pulled from Marion’s mind and made real.
“She asks for you every night,”he said conversationally. “I tell her you’re too busy with new friends.”
That broke Marion completely.
When he dropped her, her legs were useless meat—but she remained alive to feel every nerve still firing. “Crawl from now on, brave one,”he ordered.
Isaac came next.
The Judge forced him to watch himself at St. Dymphna—every time he stood outside while patients screamed. Every report documenting injuries he never questioned. The comfortable fiction that he was helping when, really, he was just another cog.
Then the Judge pried his mouth open and carved symbols into his tongue with a conjured blade. The patterns burned white-hot as he removed most of the muscle, leaving just enough to taste copper forever but never form words again.
“No more pretty lies about helping. Taste your failure forever,”the Judge decreed.
Isaac collapsed, clutching his throat, producing only wet, meaningless sounds.
“And finally...”
Those furnace eyes turned to me with something almost like affection—the personal attention of a collector who’d saved the best piece for last.
“My Sponsa Doloris.”
He lifted me without touching me. Invisible hands raised me until we were eye to eye. This close, I could see the nuclear fire burning inside his skull. I could feel the heat of it against my face.
“Do you understand what you are? Why I’ve waited so long for someone like you?”His voice dropped to an intimate whisper that still carried to every corner of the vast chamber.
“Zahra Mitchell. Parents dead in a crash while you lived. Blamed yourself for surviving. Married a monster. Lost three pregnancies and believed it was punishment for outliving your parents. Killed your husband and felt nothing—then hated yourself for that nothing. Such perfect, concentrated guilt.”
“Strip,”he roared.
And suddenly, I hung naked in the air while he prowled beneath, examining me like art he was about to destroy—with reverence.
“You’re not just guilty, Zahra. You’re guilt itself given form, the Platonic ideal of survivor’s shame. Every person who ever wondered, ’Why them and not me?’ Every spouse who felt relief at a funeral and loathed themselves for it. Every parent who lived when their child didn’t. Centuries of accumulated survivor’s guilt, refined and distilled into one perfect vessel.”
He floated up to my level, his burning face inches from mine.
