Page 92 of Elvenbred

“Owww!” She rubbed the back of her head, where it had struck the bars, then examined her fingers. No blood, but the beginnings of a large lump and matching headache. She touched her throat, and winced at the burns. She saw the remains of the metal collar off to one side, melted and misshapen.

Rock had moved to one side of the bars, and appeared to be testing them using a dozen or so of the fine extrusions … thin pseudopods that it used to, well, she wasn’t sure what it was doing … tasting the bars?

She noticed his … well, more complicated than he … its color continued to darken, and it certainly appeared more active than she had seen before.

“Feeling better?” she asked. “Getting the rods out helped?” She looked over to where the black ichor puddled on the floor. It smelled vile.

A wash of sensation flooded her mind, a cacophony that overwhelmed her senses. She closed her eyes and covered her ears. “Too much. It’s too much.”

The second effort came through more gently … a merging of feelings, of being collared, and set free. She could appreciate that. She held up one hand, and focused, whispering a simple incantation. The illusion of holding a burning ball of fire appeared in her hand. She played with it for a bit, then let it go. She smiled. I’m back.

She got up off the floor, wincing at the pain in her back where she had struck the bars. She felt her burned throat throb as she stood. “Between my back, my neck, and the lump on my head …. Was that necessary?”

Rock placed a feeling in her mind of how it had felt to be collared, which she interpreted as Would you rather have that back on?

“Good point,” she agreed. Rock tentatively extruded an appendage towards her and she got another feeling. Soothing. She remembered how he’d healed her, not one, but several times. Without a doubt, saving her life. “No,” she said, but trying to radiate thanks back at him. “This is just inconvenient. Save your strength, we may need it.”

She looked at the rod that lay closest to her. “Is it like a collar?”

Another feeling pressed into her mind, an agony of being collared, held down, and having her blood forcibly taken from her. Day after day. Year after year. She felt a flash of nausea. Then a sensation, drawn from her imagination, of her mother … a brood-mare exhausted and discarded.

“So, it’s worse. Not only does it keep you from using your magic for yourself, and serve as a punishment device, it also drains you? Of what?”

A single memory of her doing an illusion, and a hint of exasperation for missing the obvious.

“Magic. I saw that. The parasites, the elves here, draining you. Using the rods.”

She received a feeling of being a creature moving very, very slowly over very hot ground.

She ignored Rock’s reply. He seemed to have picked up a bit of sarcasm with his recovered magic. She needed to puzzle through this. Something Haldeen had said.

“You’re a Source. That’s why they have you here.”

Rock replied first with a feeling … then with her memory of seeing the first ray of sun peeping up over the horizon when she had been very little.

“So, if the rods are out, then the magic they are taking—”

Rock interrupted with a memory of a dry riverbed.

She felt her eyes widen. “And”—she said, thinking aloud, figuring that Rock would get her meaning both ways—“those barriers keeping your friends out aren’t powered anymore? Do they know that?” On the one hand … good riddance if the Predators swarmed the wall and invaded the city, but on the other hand, there were presumably innocent people here who didn’t know that their protections were paid for almost literally in blood.

Two memories intruded into her thoughts. The riverbed again … they’ll know the moment it goes dry? The second, not actually a memory, but a feeling of deep sadness. She had a glimpse in her mind of others like Rock, collared and used as Sources for the city. Not just this city. city after city after city in this world, all of them torturing these creatures to get more power than had once been gracefully given to them. Why? If the “Predators” hadn’t been attacking them before this, why had they decided to take some captive to force more magic out of them?

Slowly, tentatively, a few images. Armies. Elven armies fighting each other. A scene that would have been familiar to her, if the elven lords of her world hadn’t used the gladiators to work out their power struggles instead of armies.

“So they needed more power to fight each other. And when they started capturing and torturing you, that was when you all started fighting back. Which meant needing more of you to hold off the others coming to free the captured.”

Yes. The images grew too complex then, things he … it … was trying to show her, using her memories, but in unfamiliar ways. She tried to sort through them, the flashes … though it was starting to dawn on her that Rock was rifling through her mind for memories the way she had gone through closets looking for the perfect gown.

She tried to piece a pattern together, while ignoring Rock’s exasperation at limitations of the material he had to work with …. “The ones outside … attacking like they did the day I arrived … want to free you … but they can’t … because of the shield, and those weapons I saw.”

Rock cast the memory of a butterfly landing on a painted flower. Close enough.

She ignored the sentiment, and expanded on her thoughts. “And those attempts to free you and the others are going on all over every city in this place. Right?” Then something occurred to alarm her, and she swore. “And we’re inside who knows how many tons of rock, and your friends are about to ram the walls! Rock, we need to get out of here before they bury us by accident!”

A memory of finding shade after a long, hot walk on a summer day. Finally.

She noticed he was still attempting to do something with the bars, using extrusions to probe and test the bars.