Re: Hell's Songbird - 1

The music of chains I can’t see gleams like links of black ice in my mind’s eye. I’m a butterfly pinned to the wall by hooks anchored in stone.

Despite my panting efforts and throwing myself against those chains, they remain clamped about my flesh. The place echoes of crashing glass and squealing steel, mirroring the agony of the molten river that still rumbles inside my head. I shudder back from the memory of its liquid metal pulling at my flesh. A sky filled with red flames causes the black walls around me to bleed a heat whose fierce notes of liquid misery roll mockingly up the walls to freedom beyond the bars.

When I blink some droplets away, my mind skips into memories of tumbling in the lava. I don’t even recognise when the day ends, and the burning sky turns into a howling night. Beyond the bars that crisscross the ceiling, dual sulphurous moons sneer down with a timeless menace, yet they regard me with a cold reptilian disinterest. Another blink and the red flames fill the sky again; the heat turns the black chamber into a misty sauna, whose vapours stink of copper and vomit.

Repeatedly, the pattern goes on, beating in time to the giggles and screams from the walls and me that draw things in through the rusting iron doors. Caught in the grip of madness, I roar and scream while burning beams fly forth from my hands. When they pin me back in place with the invisible chains that shine in my awareness strange words flash in my mind’s eye.

Midway through the night, I come up for a desperate breath of clarity amid the sea of misery that drags me under. At some point, I braced my feet against the wall, and now my body curves like a drawn bow, and I do not know when or why I took up this position. With my head back as far as it can go, I pull my gaze away from the runes formed from green shattered glass that hover above the bars. Their fractured edges point at me accusingly from their position in the sky; each glint offers to slice open my eyes. As tempting as that is, I watch the wind dancing through my black feathered wings instead.

I have wings, but not white wings. Why is that important? Why did I strain myself into this position when I can ‘see’ everything about me for at least a few dozen metres, regardless of the walls or metal obstructing physical sight? The sharp notes of everything scratch awful pictures in my mind, layers of an expanding sphere that lose clarity the further from me they go. Finally, the details dull into a wall of sullen white noise. 

The muscles in my outstretched arms quiver with the strain of increasing tension rather than fatigue, and it drags my attention back to the cell. Underneath the manacles around my wrists and the stone wedges that hold my fingers spread apart, my skin feels chafed. As I try to remember why and when this happened, a blade of darkness drops from a wing and lands atop my nose. Its plumage tickles, and I realise I’ve lost a feather as it slides down my cheek. The fury within it steals my breath away; my snort causes it to drift a handbreadth from my naked body to rock back and forth in the still air. The screeching hate, pain, and rage from all around wash over me, and when I blink, the day has come again.

Time skips oddly; my mind drifts amid the lingering screams that echo from rock, and my giggles mock the howls of the other prisoners. Whenever the echoes cut off too suddenly, I know my awareness has skipped, and I’ve lost track of the moment again. Dozens of moments or hours tip back behind the couch and become lost with the rest of the loose change.

Night returns yet again, and though my wings are motionless, I’ve been floating in mid-air for hours—I have no idea how I’m doing it. I wanted to float, so I did. It’s just as well I don’t need them to float, as the cell is too small to allow my wings to extend fully.

I listen to the roaring spite of the molten river and remember burning and being tossed around within it for an agonising eternity. Amid my erratic thoughts, strange words whose meaning remains teasingly out of reach appear and vanish. Above the flames erupting from the latest being to dare my cell, sulphurous yellow moons stare back at me for hours before the music shifts, and I’ve lost another night into oblivion.

I don’t know how long I’ve been here.

Fragmented memories of things with spiked faces uglier than a frill-necked lizard scream in my mind, perishing in blasts of white light released from my hands. Dozens of days and nights roll by, and occasional snippets of time make sense among bodies exploding in my cell. 

A shiver of notes washes through the cell block, and beautiful music slaps me into the moment. Surrounded by hate and spite, the mournful, lilting notes draw my attention and enfold me in the familiar blanket of grief. Oddly buoyed by a sound that should drag me under, I finally make sense of the multistory structure that I’m in. All the openings I can hear account for hundreds of cells between those on either side and below me. The few on my floor are nearly six metres across, while those on the lowest floor, I can sense, are the size of cat carriers. Their doors sit stacked like high school locker doors, parading along each side of narrow corridors anchoring off spiral staircases at each end.

Many sit empty, yet the majority contain twisted figures shackled with the same invisible chains that hold me. Along the corridors of the cell block, bunched figures with metallic skin and thorny barbs stalk about, taunting prisoners through the barred doorways. They don’t do that to me, not now. I remember they used to, but starlight drove them away, and now a metal plate seals it.

I almost lose my mind again, but the melody from the figure draws closer, and the sonar wave of her music hooks my thoughts up from drowning in maddened depths. Every step she takes strengthens her pulsing beat within my mind and licks along my face. The details of her form slowly change from a misty outline to a distinct figure. Tall and lean, her figure reminds me of a friend, tempting my thoughts to skitter into misery again. Not wanting to lose the moment, I grasp the details: the leather and steel enfolding her flesh and the black wings that sing of rage and pain like mine.

How can I see beyond the limits of my line of sight? The thought comes up, and I drown it among the sounds of all the ugly things about me. Desperate to hold on, I keep my attention on her mouth-watering form: the pointed ears, the angularity of her cheekbones, the softness of her skin, and her bow-shaped lips make her seem like a fantasy elf. An ethereal beauty even though I can only make her out in monochrome. Everything outside my line of sight is black, white, and shades of grey. Her features are the first thing I have found beautiful in a long time, regardless of colour.

How can I perceive anything so far from my eyes? 

This place is an endless maze of questions trying to swamp my mind. How do I know her black pants and leather top are reinforced with blackened metal discs? I push the question aside and drink in everything about this avatar of grief. She wears layered darkness with death on top. Small hilts wrapped in strips of leather peek up from sheaths in the top of her boots and at the small of her back. An unstrung bow of dark wood and metal sits in a harness across her back, and a quiver bounces at her hip beside the pouch. A belt supports a long blade at one hip with supporting straps that look like a cavalry officer’s harness.

Sharp, cruel notes grumble within most of her gear, so much leather and steel. Should the correct term be skin rather than leather? I’m in a cell with imprisoned monsters, and a dark angel is coming closer, yet I’m worried about word selection. Yep, I’m mad! Leather? I’m sure none of it comes from a cow in this place. Maybe it’s still called leather, even if something else provided the skin? Wherever it came from, I don’t want to know. 

My thoughts start to jump about, but something about the whites of her eyes, cradled in long lashes, grabs at me. There are many shades of grey, but the contrast between the white and her irises’ deep pools of icy darkness makes them stand out. Their liquid depth matches her swaying hair, capturing my attention. The long-held pain and grief within her theme anchor me. With madness giggling again, I hook my thoughts to her lilting music and breathlessly await each note. For the first time that I can remember, madness retreats and stops clawing at me, enough at least to recognise the insanity that had its talons hooked within my mind.

[Resonance [1] [Ad] [3->4)]

I do not know what that means, but at least I catch it. I’ve missed so many other messages that have danced through my thoughts. Why do I feel the symbols and meaning are essential? Something from a book my dead friends showed me. Grief and anguish throb, pulsing through my veins.

The distraction almost drowns me again, but the beat of her theme is growing clearer through the hectic noise within and without.

Her stepping off the staircase into the corridor outside my cell catches my ear and snaps my gaze from the corroding bars overhead. Her music changes, its sorrow gaining a bone-cracking tension that twists my stomach.

“Is that her laughing? I thought she’d have stopped by now.”

Had I been laughing again? The echo of my giggles pitched to the notes of her sorrow bounces from the stone. Oh yeah!

The lady’s airy voice rubs its way down my spine, silken caresses that cause my wings to beat against the stone behind me.

The impact dislodges frozen bile that catches in the back of my throat, and I vomit it and the clots of blood that my laughter has drawn from me. The violence within my spasming body sprays the mess across the floor.

That’s where the smell comes from!

Short moments later, I hear claws, leather, and rustling feathers brushing against the stone.

“When she’s not laughing or screaming, she persists in saying she shouldn’t be here.”

Do I? I don’t remember speaking since they dragged me from the lava.

The growling voice outside my cell is familiar, and I can’t help but giggle at its frustration. The music inside my mind skips about with every hysterical note. Echoes bounce off stone, steel, yet more stone, and then me, which sets my flesh wiggling. My bones bounce, shaking to the frequency that now churns within the stone behind me, causing my feathers to ripple. This time it’s laughter that vomits forth and dissolves back into an ongoing fit of giggles that dance in time to the echoes in the stone. As the amusement digs hooks into my chest and seizes control, it soars back into laughter that rolls hysterically through the air.

Mr Growler’s tone gets angrier, and he bites off each word as he screams for me to stop. Yet his frustration aggravates the amusement inside my head. Every time I blink, more giggles dance upwards, creating a pressure wave that spews from my lips.

“Did the fall break her mind?”

Her lovely silken tones are closer, and the words and flesh emanate airy mourning, overriding the crashing metal and pain that fills this place; a cool balm sliding in my ears and across my soul.

“No idea, but regulations say she’s being sent over soon unless she displays any coherence. Are you here to collect her?”

A sudden rush of frantic music surges on the other side of the door, drowned by the lady’s calm tones. “Yes.”

Her hand dips into a tiny baby’s fist-sized pouch on her belt and emerges with a rolled scroll far too large to fit inside. She waves it casually before the creature’s narrowed eyes and drops it back inside the pouch.

The growling figure grows smug, and his attitude oozes into his words. “I’ll be glad to see the last of her with all those she’s killed.”

“Killed?!” The word blurts from the woman’s lip and splats against the walls amid the silence from the other. “What have you idiots been doing? Have you been feeding her experience?”

The thing rages, waving its hands about and jagged teeth snip off each word. “She gets loose, and we have to restrain her,”

“How does she get loose?” growls the lady. “How many has she killed?”

“Dozens. We’ve been ordered to keep her fingers bound apart each time. If she can make a fist, her bow jumps into her hand, and then the enchantments break until the duty wizards restore them.”

Enchantments?

A hand slaps hard against metallic skin and bounces his head off the wall before sending him skidding across the ground, sparks squealing from the stone. “You left her weapon in there?” 

“Go in and see. We didn’t have a choice about what to leave her. The regulations ain’t got nothing in them about this problem.”

“You go first.”

“What?!” 

Her slap shuts down the objection by bouncing them off the stone so hard they skid further along the hall. The lady stalks forward, slapping another of her escorts, sending them smashing to the ground, and she kicks a third down the hallway.

“Since you morons have fed her experience, all of you open the door and go inside. Pin her to the wall so I can use the scroll,” the lady instructs. “You better have a good reason to have left a weapon with her.”

“Why us?” ask other growling voices, suddenly whining children despite their deep, base voice and the cruelty of their song.

Her hiss of rage cuts their objections apart. “Get in there!”

Steel screeches on a stone amidst growls that come near the door, and then it is metal scratching metal, and the door slams inward, banging hard against the wall. As a spiked-faced thing comes barrelling into the room, giggling notes find focus, and the scream spills forth. Breathless and unbreathing, I still scream a pure note, and the thing’s head explodes. Red droplets spray from my lips, lost amid the black foulness pumping from its neck.

Guided by what the guard had said, I tried to close my hand. Notes giggle beneath my skin, and I laugh in time with them; the stone shapes they’d bound my fingers in shatter with the strong pulse of sound. The manacles that held my wrists evaporate, and I bring my arms down before me.

[Free Movement [3] [B] (21->22)

True Song [1] [B] (35->36)

Soul bow activated!]

My hand closes around a glowing bow as the message sprays across my vision. It’s not physical but crackling energy with deeper layers hidden beneath lightning and flame. As the second guard appears in the doorway, he yanks the metal plate from the frame and holds it before him like a shield. Fiery fletching brushes my cheek, and I let an arrow fly. Before it even strikes. I’m drawing another partly formed arrow from midair, and as the luminous white string comes back to touch my cheek, the third arrow fully forms. The shaft rests atop my fingers, and its butt is tight against the plasma string between my fingers. 

This one goes through the plate and blooms into a head-sized lightning blast that flares around the edges of the makeshift shield.

I punctuate each arrow flight with a word. “Let! Me! Out! Of! Here!”

By the time I finish the short sentence, there is a hole in the plate through which I can see the guard’s fallen corpse.

Another guard comes hurtling in the door, a spikey menace with jagged teeth and furious blood-red eyes. The burning fletching suddenly sprouts from his nose, and the arrow pierced through his head explodes. Shattered bits of his barbed skin chime off the metal plate, and a figure appears before me within the draw of my bow.

Her palm plants against my lower sternum and long fingers splay across my boobs. The contact makes me realise they’ve shrunk. She leans in and shoves me back against the wall to pin me in place. The music that freed my fingers lets me wiggle free, but she moves faster, giving me no space to draw another arrow. Her gaze widens in approval as her fingertips slip across my skin before black wings snap forward to form an oval overhead and encapsulate my own.

She’d just been a blur through the doorway that hadn’t let me confirm what I’d detected as she approached. The monochrome attire the music displayed has become slightly varied; black leather armour covers her body, but the metal discs riveted across it have a blood-red hue. Its shift in appearance makes it apparent that I’m seeing through the music.

A word slips softly from her lips. “Stop.”

I don’t want to add to the sorrow hiding behind the mask of her beautiful features, so I do, but mainly so I can take in her grieving beauty. I can still see her perfectly under the feathered canopy that eclipses the flames beyond the bars. Though pulled back from her face, her black tresses are wild and wind-tossed, spilling down her spine; a dark blue braided leather headband prevents her locks from falling across her face. Her complexion is a healthy olive hue, but her lush bow-lipped mouth is the colour of a ripe purple grape. Her mouth hardens, and she clears her throat, drawing my gaze back to her eyes. While she possesses dark bedroom eyes, unlike the song, they don’t invite a dalliance but warn of a last sleep. Their deep richness speaks of turned loam, possessing an open grave’s harsh, unforgiving depths.

[Combat Summary:

Devil, maliferous x3

Total Experience gained:  +1,200

Erinys: +1,200

Erinys Levelled Up!

Soul Bow [3] [J] (1->2)

Recurve Bow [1] [J] (8->9)

Note: Until you pick a class, your species will get all the experience.]

What does that note even mean? Though I can read the individual words, the only class I know the meaning of is a place for lessons and seeing friends.

The flitting music from the lady before me is more interesting than the message, and it’s a whirlwind of desires, grief, and pride that makes no sense but pulls at me all the same.

“Are you listening to me now?”

The words sound sharp and cruel to my ears, but her voice is lilting and beautiful, so I rest a finger on her lips.

“What are you doing?” the strange winged woman growls in protest, jerking her face away from my questing finger. Unless she shifts her wings enough to step clear, I’ve got her where I want her, yet I have no idea what I want next.

I killed those devils with my bow. Is she also a devil?

“I’m seeing if the movement of your lips matches your voice or the words,” I manage. 

“Put your finger near my face again, and I’ll bite it off,” warns the lady, digging a hand into a pouch. Then she digs until her elbow nearly reaches the drawstring that secures the pouch. Finally, she comes up with a weird matt-white scroll sealed with black wax, from which more screaming notes echo.

“That’s not nice.”

“You’d regrow it,” she snaps. “Are you going to listen to me?”

“Meanie.” The word slips unintended from my lips, and she frowns in confusion as I hurry on. “You made us a cozy nest with your wings. Why?”

“You used Free Movement to avoid my grasp,” she snaps. “Every Erinyes has it, so I know how to counter it. You’re nothing special.”

She rips a fingernail across the black seal holding the scroll together and pushes it against my chest. The flaking wax emits a banshee wail before the scroll bursts into cold flame, and a force smashes me into the stone. The ashes dust down my skin, drifting across my stomach and legs; they linger strangely on their way to the floor.

[Individual’s Use Name overwritten by the authority of Hierarchy of Sin: Issac.]

Tossing my head, I pretend to barf. “You gave me a boy’s name! I know I’m not a boy.” 

She snorts, flatly unimpressed. “They heard you like to laugh, so they likely gave you that name to spite your desires.”

Music is still slipping around under my skin from where she pressed the scroll against my skin, and without looking away from her mesmerising eyes, I try to trace it with my fingers. “What name did they give you?”

Her expression twists into hardened lines, and the light in her gaze goes out. “Ilya.”

“Ilya.”

The name rolls across my tongue. It’s not a cruel word. Indeed, it feels like a gentle puff when it exits my lips, yet she reacts as if I’ve slapped her and jerks back instantly to the doorway with her wings tight behind her. Desire spikes up and fights with her fear, the emotions strangling each other in a brutal brawl contained within her flesh.

“What did I do wrong?”

Ilya shakes her head and stabs a finger to point past the broken bodies. “This way. Come with me.”

That she’s just calming talking to me after I killed the ones she was ordering about makes little sense.

“What about them?”

“They screwed up, and I’m not their boss. My orders are to collect you,” stated Ilya, beckoning me to follow her.

“Why?”

“You can’t stay here, and you’ve stopped screaming, so best you just follow,” insists Ilya. “They’re not from this plane, so they’re not permanently dead.”

That makes no sense, but her words ring clean. The music in the surroundings claws at me, but I focus on the sorrow in her song and anchor myself.

Ilya spat. “They’ll be stuck where they came from for a hundred years, but no one will care. Those things are among the lowest devils intelligent enough for guard duty.”

“If I don’t?”

Her sudden bleakness drowns all desire into a cold grave. “You’ll still be leaving, but then I have orders to leave you someplace anyone sane would want to avoid.”

There is a nervous and growing fear in her that hides beneath her flat intonations.

As I approach her, my wings wobble awkwardly, turning my steps into a clumsy waddle. “What do you get out of it?”

“What do you mean?” asks Ilya flatly.

“We’re in Hell, aren’t we?”

Ilya’s gaze grows flinty. “Yes.”

“I remember devils are always making deals of one kind or another. What do you get out of it?” I ask, waving back to the remaining ashes from the scroll. “What did they get out of imposing a name on me?”

“I’m following orders, and breaking orders is grounds for punishment,” hedges Ilya.

[Sense Motive unlocked

Sense Motive [1] [B] (1)

Major Synergy with species detected: Erinys

Sense Motive [1] [B] (1->9)

Major synergy with past life detected: Marketing Consultant.

Sense Motive [1] [B] (9->17)]

The notes dancing around her make sense, and the terror inside her snaps my attention away from the screaming metallic cacophony about us. Vague memories stir teasingly but have me pressing my hands to the side of my head at the pain and hollowing grief that rises with them and spills tears down my cheeks.

“Keep yourself together,” hisses Ilya.

I try to suck air into my lungs, and Ilya presses my shoulders back, her stern gaze locking on me.

“This isn’t a meaningless task. I can hear the fear in your voice. It even killed all your desires.” 

That’s all I can manage before my shivers cut off any mention of the sharp notes roiling through her insides where the fear trembles and lurks, hidden by the tightness of her stance.

“If I don’t get you sorted out by first shift, we’ll both be canyon residents,” hisses Ilya. 

The slithering fear claws its way up her spine and leaps about within my feathers; the beat of it pulses under my skin.

“What canyon are you talking about?”

Ilya seizes my wrist, and this time, the twisting music that freed me from the manacles doesn’t slip her fingers from my skin. “It’s where they send erinyes who aren’t useful. Come along. You won’t believe it without seeing it.”

“Why are you trying to tow me?”

“We don’t have time for you to dawdle, and explanations are pointless unless you can keep yourself together,” grumbles Ilya. 

She strides away down the corridor, her wings folding away into her flesh, briefly leaving an oval of exposed skin. The figure-hugging leathers she wears seal over her bare skin, and more riveted discs appear across her back.

“To keep us both out of trouble, everything you do now in my custody is levied against me unless evidence shows otherwise,” replies Ilya. “They might not care if you kill hundreds of lower devils, or they might drop the full weight of the law on your head and mine. Avoid trouble until you’ve proven your worth and know the rules.”

I find my balance mid-stumble; the rough stones beneath my feet dig at hiding memories and send an ice pick skimming down my spine. I nervously giggle. “Can I get some clothing first?” 

“Wait until you’ve seen it first. There isn’t a point in issuing you something they’ll take away,” growls Ilya. “It’s best to know how much trouble you’re in.”

There has to be a point to something. Right?

“Why are you so angry?” 

Ilya rounds on me and catches her face between her hands. Her dark eyes are pitiless and cold, a mask for the screaming panic growing in their depths. “My assignment is to get you into a useful state or see you secure in the canyon.”

Her words are bitter, a match for the ice pick that skates along my spine, turning my laughter off and causing fears to hiccup from my lips.

Ilya squeezes my face harder between her hands, her nails cut to the bone and rivulets of blood spill across my skin. “Stop!”

Oily notes spear through her, tasting like bile in the back of my throat, a second-hand taste of fear wanting to vomit from her depths.

“Okay. What’s going on?”

“You’ll see,” snaps Ilya. “Just keep yourself together.”

With that, she’s off along the corridor with me, a wayward child being towed by her mother. We descended a winding staircase, and iron rungs clung under her boots. Though I’m barefoot, their rough texture fails to break my skin, but my wobbling steps frequently bounce me off the outer wall. Repeated clumsy flexes of my wings shove me back against the central stone column, and Ilya shakes her head.

“Clothing?”

Her only reply is a stern headshake that causes her black tresses to dance like a veil, swaying across the sealed armour.

“Wait.”

At the base of the staircase, Ilya drops her shoulder and forces open a solid metal door that wails on rusting hinges, momentarily drowning out the sobbing songs from the mute prisoners in the cells behind us.

A black iron wall juts up from the parched soil just past a line of squat stone pillboxes a half-kilometre away. From the top of that metal wall, the green symbols I’d seen through my cell bars create a dome rising over the building behind us. 

“Things in there are ready to attack us?”

Ilya grunts a sullen acknowledgement.

“How about we get out of here?” I babble.

“Are you incapable of silence?” snaps Ilya. “We need to leave the ward through the gatehouse. Don’t fly off.”

She takes me by the wrist again and leads me towards the wall. The giggling music makes her fingers slip repeatedly, but Ilya keeps hold. My feet don’t complain about the sharp rocks and dry soil underfoot, though part of me whispers about being naked, especially when more guards appear and glare at us with red, hostile eyes. Ilya ignores them all, heading directly to the gatehouse that the barracks’ position had originally obscured. This allows me to discover how far I can sense through the surrounding music, marvelling at seeing without seeing. When we’re forty metres from the gate, the first slithering note of the metal screeches inside my mind. When I close my eyes, I can still make out all the details of the surrounding ground, though the grain of the rough metal walls blends into the background.

I stop with a stumble, and the slippery notes beneath my skin finally slip my wrist out of her grasp as the overhead flames snuff out.

She lunges back, snags my wrist without looking for it, and yanks me towards the green runes crawling across the gatehouse’s open archway.

The black sky overhead is lower and empty of stars and moons. “Where are the moons?”

Ilya comes to a halt and glares back at me, rage and fear twisting her expression. “There are no moons on this plane.”

Unsure why she’s playing dumb, I can only wave at the sky where the moons always appeared. “There were two moons. Sulphur yellow orbs that would look through the bars in the ceiling, and they were always in the same spot.”

She rounds on me in frustration, temper flaring amid her song’s grief. “I don’t know what you think you saw, but Phlegethos has no moons.”

The name has me shaking my head at its twisted sound. “What’s Phlegethos?”

Ilya stops. “First sensible question you’ve asked. Phlegethos is the third plane of Hell, with no moons or stars in its night sky. During the day, its sky is white flames, while at night, there is only endless blackness. Enough questions. We’re short on time.”

She shoots a hooded glare at me before setting off.

The memory of the glaring moons pulses within my mind, and I whip my head about fighting the feeling that my brain will fall out. “I remember two yellow orbs outside the bars in my ceiling.”

“Insanity lets one see many things that aren’t there,” huffs Ilya. She doesn’t pause for even a beat, dragging me along like a wayward child as she powers towards the archway.

The guards in the archway are more of the spiked-hide devils that the message had referred to as maliferous. 

The guard closest to us licks his lips as he looks over us, and suddenly, being naked matters. With nothing else available, I draw my wings awkwardly forward and wrap them partly around myself.

“Is she off to the pens near the canyon?” a guard asks.

“None of your business,” snarls Ilya, striding through the runes with me in tow.

With the runes humming behind us, we’re suddenly standing on a flat rock that falls into a gorge stretching to either side. Heat causes the air before us to waver, filled with screams and cries. Though we’re still ten metres from the edge, I can see the ledges on the far side of it. Thousands of black-winged women stand or lie penned in cages of metal and bone along the canyons’ sides. Ilya drags me to the lip. 

Fear trembles within me at the screeching erupting from the expanse ripped through the landscape in both directions. Below what I’d heard upon arrival, there are hundreds of ledges stretching away beneath us. Within the cages on ledges before me, their truth is unmistakable. Some laugh or howl while others simply exist silently, yet nearly all I can see swell with new lives, their pregnant bellies undulating with the enraged beats of different species. I’m looking at Hell’s Battery hens.

“Legions of minor fallen angels whose minds didn’t survive the fall. They’re deemed useless to do anything but produce more devils,” states Ilya. “If you are coherent enough to function, I’ll take you to the training area to check your imprint, and then you’ll speak to a quartermaster to get your gear.”

I hear the revulsion within myself and find echoes within Ilya. “And if I’m not?”

“Work it out,” growls Ilya, spearing a hand towards a nearby cage. “They get sent to a creche when it’s time to give birth and then return to the breeding pens.” 

At those words, fear and remembered horror coil around within her and freeze my insides with the music’s frozen howls.

The themes of fear and hate that form my feathers reach down my throat and squeeze my heart in their grip. I scramble to get clear of their songs and latch my attention to the music of Ilya’s grief. 

“Have you spent time here?”

My question provokes sharp blades within her melody that dig painfully into both of us before Ilya spits. “Can you see why you need to hold yourself together?”

Ilya’s afraid of coming back here. The blades within her theme twist inside my guts, sending shivers down through my knees.

[Sense Motive [1] [B] (17 -> 18)]

“Why do they do this? An erinys is a devil? Why torment their own? Why are there only erinyes here? Is that the right plural? Are there different species elsewhere?”

Ilya doesn’t blink at the run of questions that spills forth in place of giggles that the misery here has shoved to the back of my throat. I draw breath to ask more, and she blurs. Her hand slaps across my mouth, and her eyes are ablaze. Squeezing my cheeks between fingers and thumb, she yanks my gaze away from the cages to fix on her.

“The only thing you need to know is that if you don’t follow every condition in your orders, you’ll end up here,” Ilya grunts. “Is that clear?”

Even as she threatens me, the melody of grief and heat-pounding fear burns in through her song. Her sturdy theme that I had used to anchor my attention warbles with distress.

I jerkily nod, but the furious gaze doesn’t ease.

“You’ve asked a lot of questions, so now answer mine. Do you understand what fate awaits failure?”

She forces me to look back at the canyon and glares at it herself, a burning rage pulsing through her theme.

Swallowing back the screams and laughter that want to bubble forth, my eyes widen as if they’re going to stretch off my face. “Yes! I don’t want to birth monsters.”

Yanking her gaze from the canyon, Ilya snatches at my wrist again, and the horrific scene before us vanishes.