Page 5 of Bound By the Beast Man
I hear the sharp, grating scrape of what might be glass against stone, a reminder of the prison that contains me. These sounds are not constant; they are brief, distorted intrusions that pierce the monotony of my existence, reminding me that a world I am no longer a part of still exists, and it is a place of horror.
These moments are a torment, a hint of a reality I cannot reach, but they are also my only connection to anything at all. I am a mind, a flickering awareness, held in a state between life and death. The memories are all that keep me tethered to the girl I once was, the girl who tended a garden and laughed with her sister on a sun-drenched porch. The memories are all I have left, and they are also my greatest torture. They prove I was once alive, and in doing so, they remind me that I no longer am.
The fog is not always empty. It is a canvas onto which my mind projects the worst day of my life, over and over again. The memory is always the same, a cruel loop of a perfect morning. I am nineteen years old, and the world is beautiful. My sister, Ingrid, is fifteen, her whole life a bright and shining promise ahead of her. We are on the porch, and she is chattering excitedly about the upcoming harvest festival, her blue eyes sparkling with dreams of music and dancing. My heart aches with a love for her so fierce, even here in this placeless state.
The memory is a gift and a curse. I can see my mother’s smile, hear my father’s laugh, feel the warmth of the sun on my skin. It is all so real that a part of my sleeping mind always believes, for a fleeting moment, that it is true. But the scream always comes, and the beautiful memory shatters into a nightmare. I am forced to watch the Purna glide through my village, their impossible beauty a terrible mockery. I see them drag Ingrid away, her face a mask of terrified disbelief. I see my parents fall, and the sight breaks me anew every single time.
But my own trauma is not the only horror that lives in this fog. During the moments when the veil of my stasis thins, I have heard things. The terrified screams of others, dragged into the clearing, their pain a sharp, jagged echo that pierces my dream-state before fading back into the hum. I do not know who they were, but their agony has become a part of my own endlessnightmare. The Purna’s experiments were not limited to me. They have been at their monstrous work this entire time.
The world outside my prison has its own rhythm, and even in here, I can feel the faintest echo of it. The magic that holds me is not entirely unchanging. It breathes with the seasons of the world. Four times, I have felt a deep, pervasive cold seep into the very nature of my stasis, a metaphysical chill that lasts for months before giving way to a different, warmer energy. It is not a feeling of temperature on my skin, but a shift in the magical hum itself. Four winters have passed.
This subconscious tracking is the source of the cold certainty that has grown in the core of my soul. I have relived my nineteenth birthday thousands of times. But the four cycles of cold tell me the undeniable truth. Four years have been stolen from me while I have been floating in this darkness. The thought is not a vague instinct; it is a calculation made from the only input my prison has allowed me.
I have not truly lived since the day my village died. My only escapes are my dreams—fleeting moments of running free through fields that no longer exist, or terrifying nightmares of drowning in the oppressive presence of the shadow that walked among the Purna. The thought of those four stolen years is the most profound horror of all, a loss so immense that it threatens to finally extinguish the last, flickering ember of my spirit.
7
CORVAK
For days, I have walked, and for days, the Prazh Mountains have tested me. This is a harsh and unforgiving wilderness, a landscape of jagged rock that tears at my boots and a biting wind that finds every gap in my damaged armor. The initial exhaustion from the shipwreck has settled into a deep, gnawing ache in my bones, a constant companion to the hunger that claws at my belly. On Osiris, I am a master of the wild, but this world is alien. Its plants are strange, its animals cunning and unfamiliar, their scents all wrong on the cold air. The struggle is constant, a grinding battle for every foot of elevation, for every mouthful of water.
Still, I endure. My warrior’s discipline is a shield against the despair that whispers at the edges of my mind in the dead of night. I hunt, using skills honed over a century of service. I manage to track and kill a small, furred creature with wicked-looking incisors, its meat tough and gamy but enough to quell the worst of the hunger pains. I find streams of ice-cold water that flow down from the snow-dusted peaks and follow them, knowing they are my best chance of finding a more hospitablevalley, perhaps even a settlement. Every step is a calculation of risk, every shadow a potential threat.
At night, I find what shelter I can in shallow caves or under the dense boughs of ancient pines whose needles are as sharp as daggers. I do not allow myself the luxury of a fire, knowing its light and smoke would be a beacon in this dark land. Sleep is a shallow, restless thing, filled with images of the storm, of the malevolent eyes in the clouds, and of the faces of my lost brothers. The vow we made on the ship is a burning coal in my gut, the words a constant mantra that drives me onward.
“To meet in Rach,” I whispered to the uncaring wind.
It is that promise, that sacred duty, that forces my stiff, cold muscles to move each morning, to continue this seemingly hopeless journey.
I am pushing through a dense forest of pines, the air growing still and heavy around me. The wind, which has been my constant, howling companion on the high ridges, dies away completely. In the sudden, profound silence, I hear it. At first, it is so faint I mistake it for the blood rushing in my own ears. It is a low, rhythmic sound, a melodic chanting that seems to come from everywhere at once, a vibration that I feel in the soles of my boots before I truly hear it with my ears. The sound is hypnotic, pulling at my senses in a way that is both alluring and deeply unsettling.
My every instinct, honed by decades of battle and survival, screams of danger. This is unnatural magic; I can smell it on the air, a scent like ozone and old secrets. Yet, a deeper curiosity, an inexplicable pull from a place I do not recognize, urges me forward. I abandon the direct path and begin to move with a predator’s caution, using the thick trunks of the pines and the deep, eternal shadows they cast for cover. My movements are silent, my senses on high alert, scanning the woods for any sign of a sentry or a trap.
The chanting grows louder, clearer. I can distinguish a chorus of female voices now, their words in a language I have never heard. The harmony is perfect, yet it holds a discordant note of cruelty. The thrum of magic in the air becomes a palpable pressure, a weight on my skin that makes it tingle. I am close now. I know that whatever lies ahead is a power I do not understand, and that walking toward it may be the last mistake I ever make. But I cannot turn back. Something is pulling me forward, and I am powerless to resist.
I come to the edge of a clearing and halt, my body pressed flat against the rough bark of a gnarled, ancient tree. I peer around the trunk, my breath catching in my throat. The sight before me is from some dark legend, a scene of terrible, sacrilegious beauty. The clearing is a perfect circle, ringed with massive, moss-covered standing stones that lean like the tired, ancient bones of the earth itself. The air within the circle is still, the ground bare of any life.
In the exact center, an ornate glass coffin floats a few feet above the ground. Faint, blue runes are carved into its surface, and they pulse with a soft, ethereal light, casting strange shadows on the ground below. A circle of women surrounds the coffin, their heads bowed, their voices rising and falling with the strange, mesmerizing chant. They are impossibly beautiful, with faces that could have been carved by a master sculptor, but their beauty is edged with a sharp, predatory aura. These are the Purna, the cruel witches from the Minotaur’s darkest tales.
My gaze is drawn past them, through the enchanted glass of the coffin, to what lies within. It is a woman. She has skin as pale as fresh snow and long, dark hair that spills around her like a river of shadow. Her features are delicate, her face serene in its unnatural slumber, like a princess from a storybook trapped in an enchanted sleep.
She is a vision of fragile, human beauty, a stark and jarring contrast to the monstrous power that surrounds her.
As I stare at her, a profound, primal feeling grips me. It is a jolt of recognition that goes deeper than memory, a connection that bypasses logic and reason entirely.
It is a roar in my blood, a silent recognition from a version of myself I never knew existed, an unshakeable certainty that changes everything. My mission, my brothers, my very world suddenly shifts and reorients around the sleeping woman in the glass coffin. I do not know her name. I do not know her story.
But I know she is mine.
8
DIANA
Iam adrift in the familiar, suffocating darkness when the change begins, a shift in the very fabric of my prison. The constant, low hum of the coffin's magic, a thrumming vibration that has been the background noise of my existence for years, suddenly changes in pitch. It is a subtle alteration, but in my sensory-deprived world, it is as loud and jarring as a thunderclap. My first reaction is a cold spike of fear, a feeling I thought had been numbed out of me long ago. The Purna are doing something new. A new experiment is beginning.
I brace my consciousness for a new kind of pain, a new violation. But the feeling that follows is not cold or malicious. It is something else entirely, a presence that brushes against the edges of my mind like a warm hand reaching through the void. It is a feeling so alien, so contrary to the cold cruelty of my captors, that I almost dismiss it as a hallucination, another trick of a mind that has been isolated for far too long. Yet, it persists. It is a steady warmth, a gentle pressure against the magical cage that surrounds me. It feels like a promise, a question, a call from a world I thought I had lost forever.
Yet now, something other than despair stirs within me. It is a flicker of curiosity, a fragile tendril of an emotion I can barely name. I am so used to being a passive observer of my own torment, a helpless victim of my looping memories. But this new presence. It feels like an anchor, something solid in the endless, shifting sea of my consciousness. It is a single point of light in an eternity of darkness, and I find myself, against all reason, reaching for it.
