Page 30 of Alchemised
“Don’t test me; it won’t get you what you want,” he said, his eerie eyes hooded. “You know, this is new for me. I don’t generally keep prisoners.”
He drained his glass and set it down.
“Sit.” He gestured towards the chair.
Her limbs came free. She considered trying to bolt, if for no other reason than to be annoying, but she could feel his resonance through her nerves like a trip wire.
She sat, and the instant she was in place, she couldn’t move again.
Ferron stepped behind her. She could hear him but not see him, which made her heart beat faster, ears straining for any sound.
One of his hands caught her jaw, tilting her head back until she was staring at the ceiling. She couldn’t see his face, only his other hand, which bore a dark ring that glittered in the low light. Two fingers pressed against her temple, and his thumb settled between her eyes.
He leaned forward just enough that she could glimpse his face.
“Now then, let’s see what it’s like to be you.”
She tensed as a weight enveloped the front of her skull, pushing down with slowly increasing pressure. It grew and grew until something gave way, as though Ferron’s fingers had gone through her forehead and into her brain.
Her mind and body were abruptly sheared apart. She could sense that her skull was still intact, his hands still on the surface, but it felt as though her head had been broken open, cracked like an egg, her brain exposed as Ferron’s resonance poured inside.
It wasn’t a channel of energy like normal resonance, but something immense and fluid that pushed into the space until she was suffocating under it, the grooves and crevices of her mind filled with the oppressive, growing sense of an Other trying to occupy the plane of her cerebral existence. When there were no more crevices, her consciousness was crushed as though collapsing in on itself.
Everything went red.
She was screaming.
She could hear it. Feel it. The physical part of herself still immobilised in the chair was screaming, but Helena’s mind was elsewhere, fissuring beneath the growing pressure of Ferron’s consciousness.
Ferron didn’t stop. He pushed deeper. She was drowning inside her brain, trapped as the water rose and the pressure grew and there was nowhere to go. He swallowed her whole.
There was a seismic hum, then light like a mist evaporating.
She was still staring up, eyes locked on the ceiling. A pale face hung straight above her, staring down.
Her eyes moved jerkily, startled at Ferron’s cruel features, at how alien and unnatural he was. She realised sluggishly that he was in her mind, looking at himself through her eyes.
Then he was gone. His resonance and mind ripped out like an invasive taproot.
Everything inside her mind collapsed around the empty space, the integrity of her own consciousness crumbling.
She fell sideways out of the chair, the room tumbling with her.
Her thoughts rolled like dice in her skull.
Where was she?
“Get out.”
She knew the words, but they came from far away. Sounds. Not Etrasian. Etrasian was prettier. Melodic.
This was—
Dialect.
Her thoughts were very slow.
She tried to lift her head, but the room kept moving.
