I feel around in the crushing darkness, my newly stitched-together nerves registering only rough, unyielding surfaces. My hand scrapes against something flat and coarse. It was wood. I push my arm out, and it hits a solid ceiling just inches above my face.
Panic starts like a cold drip in my chest. I feel along the sides, and it is wood, wood, and more wood. The space is exactly the length of my body and barely wider than my shoulders. A cold, paralyzing dread settles in my gut. I am in a box. A small, confining box. I am in a coffin.
I tense every muscle, ready to throw my full, reborn strength against the lid, to splinter the wood and break free, but a blinding, throbbing headache detonates behind my eyes. The pain is instantaneous, a cruel, sharp spike that steals my strength and reminds me of the fire.
My vision instantly clouds and blurs. I squeeze my eyelids shut, trying to fight the pain, to anchor myself in the physical reality of the box, but the darkness behind them is immediately replaced by a sudden, violent red light.
It's not just a color. It's the light of magic. Ancient, terrible power glowing from familiar, interlocking runes, a magical array I've only seen in forbidden texts. This is a mechanism of power far older and more profound than anything Thaurion possessed.
My body stays rigid in the coffin, trapped by the crushing wood and the throbbing agony, but my soul drifts, pulled loose in a sickening, hazy rush. The feeling is like falling upward. One moment, I am suffocating on cold earth.
The next, I am floating silently in a cramped, wooden shed. The smell of dried herbs and raw earth fills the air. I look down and see a young girl, no older than ten, hunched over a cluttered workbench, concentrating fiercely on a small, clay figurine.
Her fine, dark hair is streaked with sawdust, and her small hands are stained with ash and earth from her work. She looks so intensely focused, so unaware of me. And then I see it, the delicate line of her jaw, the shape of her eyes. She looks painfully, eerily similar to me. A sharp, cold wave of absolute certainty hits me.
The moment shatters. The shed door flies open, slamming against the interior wall and letting in a shaft of weak, gritty light. An older man steps in, a hurricane of spite.
His face is a mess of drunken rage, his head slick with sweat, two pathetic strands of greasy hair clinging desperately to his scalp. He sees the girl, sees the concentration of her work, and erupts.
He sweeps a pile of chopped wood, ragged, sharp pieces meant for the stove, from the floor and begins to hurl the pieces at her small body.
"Useless!" he bellows with the first throw, which strikes her shoulder.
"Useless!" with the second, hitting her side.
"Useless!" with the third, the word a vile mantra of pure hatred.
I feel the sickening impact in my chest, a phantom pain that mirrors her own desperate flinches. I watch her arms fly up to shield her head as the jagged wood slices her skin. Blood is seeping down her bruised forearms, tracking dark paths through the grime and sawdust.
I surge forward, screaming silently into the void, trying to throw my body in front of hers, to block the attacks with my own flesh. But I am an invisible shadow. The wood flies straight through me, a chilling, weightless sensation, and thuds violently against her small temple. The sound is muffled yet deafening in this sudden, terrible vision. I can't touch her. I can only watch helplessly.
Thick blood immediately wells up from the wound on her temple, a horrifying red stream that begins to track down her pale face, soaking into the sawdust clinging to her cheek.
"You useless parasite! Come here, you brat!"
The old man drops the wood. The rage in his eyes is now cold and calculating, a terrible mix of failure and cruelty. He grabs a handful of her hair, yanking her small head back, and drags her out of the shed.
Her subsequent screams are small, heart-breaking ruptures of sound that pierce my ear drums. They are muffled by fear, yet the loudest, most devastating sound in the universe.
I follow them into the yard, an impotent spirit tethered to her suffering. My gaze snags on an upended wooden crate. Bottles, hundreds of them, are shattered across the dirt.
The potent, sickly-sweet smell of spoiled herbs and failure hangs heavy in the air. I see the damp, intact label on a single bottle neck sticking out of the mud: Love Potion.
My heart sinks, a cold, paralyzing weight in my spectral chest. They were using her to make magic potions to profit off of.
The older man tosses the girl violently to the ground, sending up a spray of dirt. "You were supposed to make potions that fucking work!" he screams, looming over her curled form. "How am I supposed to sell this shit? You should have died with your mother, you are useless!"
The words are a final blow. The young girl curls in on herself, her cries changing pitch from pain to absolute, existential terror. I try to shield her from the venomous words, from the awful pain, but I can only float, witnessing the agonizing life of this child.
Just then, a new figure slices through the scene. It is a teenage boy, lean and radiating cruelty. He runs over with a leather whip dangling from his hand.
"Dad, here!" he chirps, a sickeningly smug look fixed on his face, excited to witness and participate in the brutality. He hands the whip to the older man, his eyes bright with malicious anticipation. The blood drains from my face as I realise what they were about to do to her.
The older man snatches the whip his eyes never leaving the curled girl. The leather strap is thick and heavy, a terrifying weapon in his massive hand. "You dare make me look like a fool in front of my neighbors? They all came asking for their fucking money back!"
The whip cracks. It's a sound like a rifle shot, immediately followed by a wet, tearing noise. I see the flesh on the girl's back instantly break and bloom red across her frail body.
She cries out in blinding, agonizing pain, a sound that shreds the last remnants of my composure. But the rhythmic, merciless whipping doesn't stop.
"You owe me a thousand dollars, you useless piece of shit!" the man yells with each strike, the monetary debt somehow more important than the destruction of a child.
Finally, the fury is spent. He tosses the whip down, breathing heavily, his face slick with a nauseating mix of sweat and satisfaction. "I should have just sold your organs!" he hisses.
The girl lies on the cold ground, a shattered thing, emitting only soft, continuous whimpering.