Fading Light
The next year passed like a blur. Every day I would get put through hell, and every night I'd spend healing and singing to the slowly rotting body of Mill. After a few days, the prince had started wearing a mask, but other than that, he never acknowledged her body. Her arms came loose after three or four months, and she slumped into a pile on the floor, finally free of her chains. I was only getting to eat once every couple days at this point, and my healing didn't seem to be slowing down much despite my ribs showing and my stomach shrinking inward.
It was painful, the tortures grew worse and worse, and the prince started keeping track of what took the longest to regrow. Intestines seemed to grow slowest, and digits seemed to grow fastest. If I was exposed to acid at a steady rate, I would grow back the slowest overall, but healing exponentially, eventually healing faster than the acid can burn, but that took a while. Other than that, burns took a long time to burn as well, the worms having to 'eat' the burned flesh away before they could heal me. By far though, my least favorite torture was the drownings. He would chain me to the bottom of the iron tub, and fill it with water, and mark how long it took for me to drown, and how long it took for me to revive. By the end of the tests, I would be trashing, reviving and drowning over and over again within seconds.
After 8 months or so, when Mill was just starting to show her beautiful white and yellow bones, the prince started to extract worms from me for use in experiments. It was painful, and at first I tried to pretend they died after removal, but he grew wise to that quickly.
He put them into the stomachs of rats at first, but I pulled them out, burrowing away from the gross, wrong insides of the rodents. He got wiser after that, and began soaking the worms in embalming fluid before inserting them. The worms became almost numb to me after that, and they still moved and repaired, but I could barely feel them inside the rats. After some trial and error of how much to embalm the worms, the prince was able to trick a worm into healing a rat's incision, patching it with the same, pink and black skin I was now covered with.
This pleased the prince very much, and he began putting large amounts of my worms into everything from dogs to chickens, and then injured them to see them heal. Unfortunately though, it seemed the worms would use themselves up on the repairs, and any further damage to the animal would not be healed. Furthermore, when removing the wing of a chicken who had been filled with a considerable amount of worms, both the prince and I were surprised to see a human hand grow out of the side of the chicken. Upon inspection, it was the same shape and size as my hand.
The next step for the prince was to find out where the worms came from, and where their seemingly endless source of healing came from while they were in me. To find out, he vivisected me, and traced the worms back to the mass in my chest; the center I had felt all those months ago. Upon cutting it open, worms gushed out in a swarm, and began repairing me quickly, faster than I had been healed before. In under a minute, they had ripped my skin off of the clamps holding me open, and 'sewn' me back up, sealing my split open ribcage and filling the hole in the mass.
The prince was ecstatic. To him, this was as big of a breakthrough as the discovery of secular magic. Every day for weeks he tried to cut into me, tried to cut the mass out of my chest, but couldn't get more than a sliver before the worms flooded out and blocked his scalpel. He would groan in frustration and stab at them out of anger, but not making a dent in their flow. For me, knowing that every day I would be cut open and have my ribcage shattered was a comfort. Not knowing what torture I'd go through was a torture itself, but if I knew what to expect, it somehow made the days a little bit more bearable.
After almost a month of fighting with the worms, the prince put two and two together and decided to try pouring embalming fluid onto the worms while he cut. I had realized this would work after a few days of being split open. I had been hoping the prince would somehow overlook it, but I could only get so lucky for so long. After a few tries, he was able to get a chunk of the mass out of me, about the size of a fruit slice, and he forced it into the stomach of a rat he had prepared. The buzz of the embalming fluid wasn't as strong on the chunk, and I could 'see' where the rat was, and while I couldn't control the chunk, I could still feel it. At first nothing happened, but after a second, worms began to ooze out of the chunk, and sluggishly seal up the rat.
The prince then cut the rat again, and again the cut closed up. The prince was shaking at this point, and grinning wildly, he snipped off the rat's paw. A few seconds later, and it was healing too, but it was a tiny, human hand growing back instead of a paw. He laughed out loud and jumped up in the air, clapping. I was shocked, I had never seen him act this way in all my time here, and it was almost more scary than seeing him hover over me with a scalpel.
He looked over at me and spoke to me for the first time in months
"Well, sweetheart, I think we're ready! I'm finally going to be immortal! I am so, so happy to have found you, I think we'll do the final surgery at the end of the week, and as a thank you, I want to give you a meal every night until then, my treat!"
I opened my mouth to tell him to stuff it, but the embalming fluid was still pooled in my chest cavity, and all that came out was a rough
"Hhhhhhh..."
He laughed one more time and finished up for the day, not speaking to me again. He put the rat in a small cage, and locked me up as usual. I could feel the rat moving around, feel the worms inside it, confused and worried at their new home. As the prince went upstairs, I began to cry for the first time since I lost Mill.
~
The end of the week rolled around before I knew it, the prince kept his word and I got an actual meal of table scraps every day of that week, and he stayed upstairs the whole time, not coming down to torture me once. When he finally did arrive, he was accompanied by a man I had never seen before with white robes and a beaked mask, and a new guard, helping the old one carry a large padded table, like the one I was usually strapped to, but new, and larger. I was carefully strapped to mine, and the prince got on the other one, and looked at the man I didn't know very sternly.
"Now, I trust you will follow the instructions exactly? This is extremely important, and I won't be awake to guide you, I need to know I can trust you to-"
"Yes, yes, I practiced on a peasant yesterday, it should be a breeze, I have operated on the king himself, you are in good hands, sir."
The prince nodded slowly and lay all the way down.
"Well, if you've already practiced it... Let's get started, I want to do this quickly, I never want to be on a table like this again."
With that, the man in the beaked mask poured a powder into a glass of wine and the prince drank it dry. I looked at the man, as the prince slipped into slumber, but he made no motion to give me any such drink. Just as well, I preferred to be awake for torture anyway, it made it easier to control the worms. The surgery went as it usually did, although the new man seemed to be much more skilled at breaking bones and cutting than the prince, and the prince was opened up in minutes, and I in less than that. I tensed up and bit back screams as the man poured the fluid in and went to work, cutting away almost half of the mass before the worms swelled up too much. He ignored me as they filled my opened torso, doing their usual job of ripping the clamps off my skin and pulling me together again, my naked organs feeling clothed under their small bodies.
I watched closely as the man nestled the mass in between the prince's lungs, a bit lower than mine, a bit farther from the heart. The worms slid out, nosing around, trying to find their place, but no matter how much I pulled on them, they wouldn't listen. The man put the prince's ribs back into place, and loosely draped the skin back over where it should go, and watched as it shifted and slid into the proper place. It pulled tight, and sealed up up with a pink and black line. The prince's breathing shifted, and he sighed almost contentedly.
The man nodded and wiped his hands on a rag, causing me to notice his robes were still spotless, despite the amount of blood on every surface at this point. He pointed to the other end of the table from himself and told the original guard to pick it up, as they were going up to the prince's room, he needs to wake in his own bed, not this pit. She nodded, and got into position. The man glanced around the room, and then to the other guard.
"You. Clean this mess. get all the blood off everything, and put the subject into the furnace. and while you're at it, put the remains in the cell into the furnace as well."
The guard looked at me and raised his eyebrows
"Should... should I kill her first?"
"I doubt that's possible, just do as I say and stay here to watch the furnace until I come for you."
And with that, he lifted his side of the table, and he and the original guard went upstairs. I looked at her, wondering what she thought of all this, and our eyes met. She looked scared, then sad, then turned away, looking behind her as she walked the table up the stairs. I thought about what it'd be like to burn to death. I wasn't sure I could, but I wanted to try. I was tired of everything, and I just wanted to be free. I didn't fight as the guard drug me over to the furnace and gently pushed me in. The coals and flames instantly shot pain through my whole body and I screamed, louder than I ever had when the prince was 'working' on me. The guard jumped back as I writhed, and slammed the door.
A few moments later, the door opened again and Mill came tumbling in onto me, her body bursting into flames and crackling on the metal walls of the furnace. I cried again, and hugged her body, feeling her flames and mine melt together as we roasted in the orange glow. She slowly fell apart, and I felt my body turn to ash, then my bones started to crack and crumble, and I couldn't stay upright anymore. My eyes and ears were gone, I couldn't see or hear, or feel or sense anything around me, nothing except the worms. I could feel the rat in the cage, my various severed digits and limbs, and far away, at the top of the castle, the prince.
My mass was writhing in what was left of my chest, squirming and kicking and putting out worms. I could feel it, though I couldn't feel the pain myself. I felt the worms slide out and extinguish the flames touching me with their pink slime, and I screamed again inside, without lungs or throat as fresh pain erupted where they touched my remains. The worms poured out without end, slithering out of the mass in my chest and flooding over me, pain screaming into existence as I was stitched back into one piece. I felt my organs reform, my skin, my eyes, all protected by a mass of worms, a pile of wet that fought off the heat. I peered out through the worms and saw the door again, and crawled for it, my knees and palms screaming in pain as I sunk into the coals past what the worms could protect.
I pushed on the door and cried out in frustration. It was latched, and my fingers were too thick to fit through the crack between the door and the wall. I slid my worms over to the latch, but only a few could get through, and they weren't strong enough to slide it up and over. I slid back in defeat, I would at best have to wait until the door was opened for more coals. If I could lunge forward, I could make it, and hopefully my heat would burn the guard enough to make him unable to fight me off and put me back in.
I rocked back in the glowing pile and focused on the worms, making sure to keep them coming, pushing them out of me and letting them burn. I looked around the small chamber, and my eyes fell on the embered remains of Mill, burned up to nothing. I reached out stroked where she had lain, and my hand caught on something. I dug into the coals, and pulled out her pendant. her holy symbol. I looked at it for a second, and then it clicked. I went for the door and slid the pendant through the crack and slid it up, the door popping open as the pendant lifted the latch. I opened it all the way, slowly, and looked around.
The new guard was cleaning, with what looked like twisted rags in his ears. I guessed my screams were riding on his conscious a bit too much. I crept up on him, the glowing hot symbol in my hand, wreathed in fire and worms, and I lunged. The fight was quick, and he went down fast, my arms and body burning into his flesh, and my hands choking out his screams. Once he was down, I smashed open the cabinet with a stool, and ate all the parts the prince had removed from me. It took a while to finish eating some of them, such as the leg, or the many entrails, but before too long, I had reclaimed all that he had taken from me, and I felt almost complete again.
I say almost, because there was still the matter of the animals that held my worms. Almost all of them had been burned to a crisp in the furnace when they were no longer useful, but there were still two left. The rat with the human hand, and the prince himself; an animal if there ever was one. I opened the cage with the rat, and spoke to it through the worm mass inside it. It couldn't respond, but it seemed to understand well enough, and crawled out and onto my head. I wasn't a monster, if I could save an innocent life, no matter how small, I would.
Upstairs, the worms were mostly back inside me, and I crept through the halls, retracing my steps from my first escape attempt. My bare feet padded on the carpet once again, and I slid through the main hall, and up to the door. I put my hand on it, and looked around the room. No sign of the guard, no sign of the prince. I let out the breath I'd been holding, and opened the door just a crack and slipped out.
Sitting on the steps of the castle, facing away from me, was the guard. The one who impaled me, the one who got us caught, the one who got Mill killed. I clenched my sharp teeth and gripped the holy symbol in my hand. She was my one obstacle to freedom. I took a step forward, and my foot slapped against the stone. She whipped around, and her eyes met mine. She looked scared, then sad, then she slumped, and turned away. She didn't say a word, didn't raise her spear, didn't raise her head. I stared at the back of her. Was she asking me to kill her? Was she letting me go? In the end, I slipped past her, ducking over the railing and off into the woods. Looking back as I got to the tree line, I saw she hadn't moved.