Dusk Falls

Chapter 1

The Deadlands was an apt, if unoriginal name for the enigma to those familiar with it. It existed as a foreboding unknown looming over those settled in the lands around it. The border itself was a vast ring of inhospitable mountains rising high into a permanent, perpetually swirling crimson mass of cloudy mist. The mountains were a mottled patchwork of browns, grays, and blacks with no visible signs of vegetation or animals calling those mountains home. Even birds in their migrations flew around the Deadlands, never getting within half a league of the mist concealing the peaks of those mountains.
Of course the natural curiosity of man had gripped several intrepid explorers over the generations, but no pass into the Deadlands had ever been found. First-hand accounts of the mountains were of the jagged, cruel stone protrusions erupting from them like a line of defense against intrusion. And it was effective. General consensus agreed the only way into the Deadlands was to go over the mountains and the few stories of those bold enough to try all ended in their failure to return.
So the race of man was content to “let sleeping dogs” lie and chose to live under the ominous mountains until they were simply a facet of an existence otherwise dominated by the minutia of day to day life and its responsibilities. The half league between the base of the mountains and where man’s civilization began was an unstated no-man’s land. The birds avoided this area with some sense man lacked, but in all the generations man had attempted to settle it, the no-man’s land would not support any crops, left livestock weak and sickly, and seemed to slowly steal the vitality and vigor of those attempting to live in it. Coarse sand and dirt, the color of the clouds above the mountains gave a desolately desert-like appearance to the no-man’s land. It was, and always had been, utterly flat and devoid of even the smallest growths.
Stretching for dozens of leagues around, the Deadlands itself was, as far as anyone could guess, as uniformly inhospitable as the No Man’s land near it. That speculation was correct, though the man standing in the middle of the Deadlands had no interest in sharing this. Isolation and power had brought him here. He was a singularly unpleasant man. If ‘man’ could be truly applied to him. Standing in the middle of large ring of blood colored soil, he looked more demon than man.
He was tall, lean, and well-muscled. This was evident because he was naked from the waist up and his exposed skin was bathed in silver moon light as he glared up at the full moon above him. It left his skin looking sickly gray. Across his skin were symbols of a long forgotten language glowing faintly violet and scurrying across the exposed skin like a swarm of insects. An angry, deep scar ran from above his right shoulder in a serpentine path and ended above his left hip. This scar glowed as well, but a sickly emerald with strands of black churning in whorls in parts of it.
His shoulders were squared as his gaze stayed locked on the moon above. It was not the face of a man. It was the face of a nightmare. His crimson hair was long and bound back in a black leather thong, framing a thin, hawkish face. The jaw line was narrow with high set cheek bones surrounding a hooked nose and thin lips. The eyes themselves were something else entirely. His left was large and where the white should have been was a dark violet with an iris of the same shade as the crawling symbols dancing over his skin. The pupil was a stark white rather than black, and it stood out in sharp contrast to the rest of his eye. It left the impression that his gaze was boring through whatever it focused on.
The right eye was what would have led any reasonable person to think him a demon. A scar of the same angry depth as that on his chest rand from his left temple to below his left jawline and the socket no longer held the eye of a man, but the burning, sparking emerald glow of power and unspoken corruption. It was a smoldering power spilling out into the air around the man and commanded attention, if not fear. At the moment it was pulsing and spitting out green sparks as it was locked on the silver light of the moon, unblinking and disconcerting.
The breeches the man wore were thick leather, clearly, and appeared gray in the moonlight. The contrast of the simple gray from the waist down next to crawling violet almost left the man looking like there was nothing below that waist. The left leg had several pockets of varying sizes running down it, while the right held various knives also of varying sizes in loose ties. His boots, cut from the same leather and equally as thick, had studs running the length of the soles which dug into the loose sand and gravel to help maintain firm footing on the shifting terrain.
Around the blood circle ran smooth, polished stone of absolute blackness and cut perfectly squared, razor sharp edges rising to the ankles of the man within the blood circle. Even in the silver light of the moon, the ring was simply a void to the naked eye.
When the man did pull his gaze from the moon it fell to a large bowl at his feet. It was crafted from the same smooth stone as the blood circle’s boundary ring. He squatted down and ran his left hand over the inside of the bowl as he began to whisper. The words he spoke were so soft it would have been difficult to make them out from a single pace away, but as they escaped his lips, sickly emerald vapor, faint but visible, started rising from his lips.
As he continued his whispers, the bowl began to glow in the deep violet of his symbols where his hands brushed over the stone. He worked the inside like he was greasing a pan before cooking with it, all the while the words and the vapor continuing to flow from his lips. Once the inside was entirely aglow with violet, he turned the bowl over, this time taking his right hand and placing it on the underside of the bowl.
“Varsulin,” he growled. “I so name myself.” His voice pierced the silence around him. It was a harsh baritone and the air around him rippled with unseen power. As if by an invisible hand, lines of tracery started moving across the underside of the bowl in faintly glowing emerald, the vapor from his mouth also rising from those symbols as they were completed. By the time the man calling claiming himself Varsulin rose to his feet, the underside of the bowl was littered with those emerald symbols and he turned the bowl over again to return it to the center of the blood circle.
Varsulin stood over the glowing voidstone for a moment while he continued his whispering. He raised his hands, palms out, to face opposite sides of the blood circle as he stopped his whispering and the voidstone boundary ring sprang to life with the violet symbols appearing instantly and running around the ring frantically. Outside the ring a wind stirred to life, its strength quickly rising. The wind did not penetrate the ring, but it picked up the sand and dirt around the ring as it began to circulate around the ring.
Varsulin brought his hands down after several moments, the wind continuing to gain strength and starting to howl, and reached into one of the pockets in his breeches to retrieve a vial as long as his hand and almost three fingers wide. In it was a dark, crimson liquid, clearly blood on closer inspection, which he held aloft over the bowl. He pulled the stopper and whispered again, the vapor escaping his lips a faint violet this time. He turned the vial up to pour the blood into the bowl and the vapor escaping his lips snaked down to encircle the falling blood until it landed in the bowl.
Once empty, the pool of blood in the bowl looked black next to the glowing violet and Varsulin nodded in approval as he replaced the stopper and vial. He reached for another pocket and withdrew a similar vial, this too filled with blood. Instead of repeating the action of pouring however, he held it above his head, looking at the moon through it and whispered again, this time a crimson vapor escaping his lips to rise around the vial. The blood in it started to swirl and bubble in the vial, becoming a rose red instead of the rich crimson. After the entirety of the blood had shifted hues, the bubbling stopped and Varsulin pulled the stopper to let that blood fall into the bowl, still whispering crimson.
The blood in the bowl started to swirl as the crimson vapor hovered over it. For a moment a bizarre spiral of red and crimson hypnotically churned, but Varsulin did not stare at it for more than a moment because his attention returned to the moon overhead. He reached his left hand up to it, palm open and upturned, while his right traced a strangely beautiful symbol in the air. Where it traced a line of silver hung in the air. Once the symbol was finished it filled in with that silver light and hovered between him and the moon.
He again whispered his unheard words, but no vapor rose this time. Instead, the symbol itself began to pulse with beats of brighter silver and delicate strands of that silver started to flow gently down to the bowl. They danced and interwove amongst themselves in a beautiful display of intricacy as they started to sink into the blood the bowl held. The blood started to glow silver as the strands poured into the bowl like the blood itself had, and Varsulin continued his work until the blood was glowing the same bright silver as the symbol pulsed.
He pulled his left hand back abruptly and the silver symbol folded in on itself immediately, disappearing in a thin line that raced up toward the moon. Varsulin retrieved one of the knives from the other side of his breeches, his expression dark and intense. He raised his right hand and made a swift, deep cut across his palm. The blood flowed readily, a dark crimson with a disconcerting hint of emerald in it, and he crouched to place his hand over the silver contents of the bowl. The blood fell into the bowl and where it touched, the silver dimmed. Varsulin let his blood continue to flow until the silver had faded entirely, replaced by the crimson of the first vial’s contents.
Nodding again in unspoken satisfaction, Varsulin clenched his hand shut and rose to his feet. Outside the ring was a vortex of incomprehensible force and violence. Still he took no notice of it. A single bead of sweat rolled down his left temple as he inhaled deeply. Taking both hands, he began to speak, this time loud and deliberate in his words. The words themselves were lost in the scream of the tornado around the ring, but instead of faint vapor a green fire escaped the lips, joining the flare of his left eye. As he did this the contents of the bowl started to rise in rivulets. It flowed as it would from a wound, but it flowed up. Bit by bit it flowed until it reached a single point in front of Varsulin’s hands. It started to collect there to form a sphere which grew large with each moment as the blood trickled into it.
Once the last drop had joined the hovering orb, Varsulin plunged his hands into it and began to pull and twist it. It ceased to be blood and became as clay. His hands glowed faintly silver as he started to work the blood into a shape. Crude at first, the shape became clearly with each moment as Varsulin continued his chanting. It was fast becoming a bipedal creature, a human, standing neutrally with arms down. The screaming wind and the green fire wrapped around Varsulin’s consciousness as the sculpture took the form of a woman, her soft features and hair clearer as Varsulin worked. After a moment it became clear it was more girl than woman, the youth of her features and body clear as the details sank into crystal clarity.
Varsulin finished and stopped his chanting for a moment to inspect his work. The form of the girl was hovering in front of him, the expression on her face blank and neutral. He inspected further, taking his time to look at every single part of the blood sculpture. Once apparently satisfied, Varsulin again plunged his hands into the figure, resuming the pulling and twisting as the form. He pushed it down and the human girl seemed to melt into something longer. The moon shone down on a shape that was now becoming quadrupedal, four paws taking shape and a thick coat of fur crafted with the supple fingers of Varsulin.
As the muzzle and face took shape, the features of a wolf settled into the same clarity the features of the girl had. The eyes of the blood wolf were as vacant as the girl’s had been. The sharp teeth were visible, but the expression was devoid of any consciousness. Again Varsulin stopped his chanting and inspected the hovering form. Again he meticulously examined it before stepping back. His expression was one of clear pleasure. He clapped his hands together suddenly and the form dissolved into blood falling back into the bowl.
It fell without splashing, resting as a placid pool in the bowl amid the chaos of the strange ritual. Varsulin looked down intensely at the bowl and muttered a few more words when a shadow overtook the bowl and its contents were swallowed by darkness. When that darkness lifted, the bowl was gone, replaced by a flask of smoky glass, the blood contained in it. He turned his gaze back to the moon and defiantly spat at it before placing his hands together in front of his face and flinging them outward, an invisible wave of power again washing outward. The storm died instantly, the dust and dirt falling like rain, still unable to cross the voidstone ring, but the glow faded gradually and the blood circle once again settled into silence, bathed only by the moon.
Varsulin stood for one more moment, surveying the land around him before turning on his heel and making his way toward a small, jutting outcrop of stone rising up from the ground at an angle. The air around him was scorched and acrid, the feel of it on his skin a subtle, constant burning. He paid it no mind however as he calmly and confidently drew closer to the protruding stone. It seemed a solid, unforgiving jut from the earth, but as Varsulin approached it he continued his pace without stopping. The symbols crawling over his skin began to follow a vaguely recognizable pattern and the stone rippled like water when a stone is dropped through it as the man passed through. On the other side was the beginning of a passage, unseen and inaccessible but through the stone which was once again solid and unyielding.
It was a small passage, clearly meant for a single person to move through. The stone was as smooth as glass and artfully curved at the roof giving the passage an arch. The passage itself was several heads taller than Varsulin himself and was lined with torches on each side every half dozen paces. None save those at the entrance were lit at the moment and the fire burning there looked more like a bubbling fountain of fire rather than the normal flames rising up towards the sky and no smoke or heat could be felt from it. The passage itself slopped gently down and curved to the left. The air in it was cool and pleasant despite the apparent seal from outside circulation and as he moved down it the flames of the torches extinguished themselves and reignited in the next set.
This continued as Varsulin moved down the passage, the shifting shadow of the man horribly distorted on the smooth walls. He continued his journey through the passage for quite some time, the passage continuing the gradual descent with the air growing slowly cooler until he reached an unassuming door constructed from a charcoal colored wood, off color brass bolts reinforcing it. He made no move to reach for the door, rather he kept walking and a small symbol lit up on the door’s center as it swung open to permit him.
The room he was admitted to was small and another, identical door could be found opposite the one he entered. To his left was a small fireplace, the bubbling and smokeless fire welling up in it. The room was lit by a floating orb of light suspended in the air at the top of the room. On the right of the room was a series of hooks with a robe hanging from one. It was to the robe Varsulin made his was after entering the room. It was a rich emerald, not sickly like the magic, but rather regal in both color and material.
Varsulin donned it gracefully, the robe covering all from the neck down. His hair stayed tied back and the fiery eye had subsided into a smoldering ember. He let a heavy sigh escape and proceeded through the small receiving room. Opening the door on the other side revealed a moderately sized, surprisingly open room that would easily have fit in any small noble’s residence. It was not opulent, but the floors were smooth, cream colored marble, with several sapphire colored rugs of soft fabric Varsulin’s boots sank into as he crossed them.
A small arch was opposite the small door Varsulin entered from and rising from the marble were gracefully carved stairs wrapped around the sides of the room, rising to meet a railed passage above the arch with doors on both ends, more simple wooden doors sitting humbly amid carved stone. Through the arch itself the room beyond seemed to shift every few seconds. The view would dissolve into what might be described as granules of sand that swirled and flowed, doing so for a moment before coming back together with a wholly different view through the arch.
Varsulin stood before that shifting passage and made a small gesture with his left hand. As he made it, the picture melted into a large stairway leading down, the same torches from the rocky passage lining the stairwell. He passed through the arch and descended the steps as the light traveled down with him. When the steps ended, Varsulin was in a dimly lit corridor of traditional stonework. The corridor itself was oddly immaculate, devoid of dust, dirt, or grime. As he strode down it, there were no signs of vermin or the insects one would have expected to find in such a place.
Varsulin passed many doors, all identical, until stopping at one. Looking at it, another small symbol glowed briefly before it swung open to admit him to the room. The room he entered was not much larger than the earlier receiving room. There was no hearth in this room however, though it too was lit by a glowing orb near the ceiling, leaving the room as bright as midday without clouds. The left side of the room had a large table entirely made of the voidstone, resting chest level to Varsulin and extending out from the wall itself with no legs supporting it. On that table sat the bowl from Varsulin’s ritual, the blood still in it. He glanced at it briefly, approval in his eyes, before turning his attention to the room’s occupant.

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Reika was jolted awake when the door of her cell opened. That was how she saw this room she inhabited. The chains bolted into the wall and running to shackles binding her left wrist and ankle to them were grim reminders of her captivity. It didn’t matter if the room was well lit, clean, and moderately furnished. It didn’t matter if the food was served regularly and was of excellent quality. She was still a prisoner.
The sound of the door had pulled her back into consciousness and she was immediately seized with fear. She knew who was coming. She rose from the small pallet she slept on and started backing into a corner of the room. Reika was not a tall girl to begin with, but as she huddled away from the opening door she looked more like a mouse being cornered by a cat. Dressed only in a simple white shift, she was clutching herself with thin, pale arms so marred by scars they was virtually no unblemished skin remaining. Below the hemline of the shift were pale legs as thin as the arms and equally as marred in grotesque scars.
Her hazel colored hair was tangled and disheveled as it cascaded down her back and over her face, obscuring her fear as her eyes fixed on the door and more intensely at the man entering. She knew his name and nothing more. He brought pain with him each visit for unspoken reasons. He was cold and cruel. Reika felt, at times, it would be easier if he displayed anger or hostility. If he was a monster that delighted in her suffering it would have been terrible, but she would have understood the motivations of the man. Varsulin was none of those. His clinical detachment to her screams and tears frightened her far more than any outright cruelty ever could have. In her nightmares, it wasn’t the greedy hunger burning in a madman’s eyes haunting her. It was the glacial gaze of unwavering, calm, and every calculating curiosity.
Her eyes followed Varsulin as he entered the room and followed his gaze towards the table where the bowl now rested. It had not been there when she had wearily succumbed to sleep the previous night, but she had seen the hated object before and she knew what the presence of both bowl and man meant. Tears started welling up in her eyes as she despairingly shook her head. Her mouth formed the word ‘no’ but the word itself did not escape her lips. She watched him approach the table with the dreaded calm she so hated after acknowledging her. With his back still turned, his harsh baritone pierced the silence.
“Will you continue to fight?” It was spoken evenly, without anger or any sense of perverse joy in his voice. He was raising a thin tube and inspecting the needle at one end of it, a small flame hovering over his finger while he ran the needle through it. Reika did not answer. Her lips had stopped moving, but she was still shaking her head, her tears flowing freely now. She felt them dripping on her arm. When Varsulin turned around he had set the needle down and turned his full attention to Reika.
“The hard way then,” he said with a slight nod. His expression never implied irritation, anger, joy, or satisfaction. It was stolid and clinically practical. He looked simply as if he was acknowledging the necessity of an action as a greater part of a task. To that end, Reika watched him approach the voidstone extending out from the wall, in the same fashion as the table, forming a small alcove in the corner of the room opposite Reika.
This extension wasn’t a wall precisely. It did not rise to the ceiling. It was only a head taller than Varsulin himself and only extended out two paces. Roughly in the middle of it and around the same height as Reika’s shoulder was a hole. It was large enough for Reika’s arm to reach through and through it also ran the chain attached to the shackle of her wrist. Unlike the voidstone employed in Varsulin’s ritual however, this one was polished so perfectly Reika could see herself in it as if it were a true mirror and looking at her reflection frightened her.
It was her eyes that inspired the most fear. The eyes of the girl she saw in that stone were not hers. Or at least not the ones she had when first she found herself in this prison. Once the cool green of spring grass, they were now alien to her. She didn’t know when it began or remember when she first noticed it, but with each visit from Varsulin she was aware of new changes.
The changes in and of themselves might not have been so terrifying had they been uniform. As it was, her right eye had lost the cool green. It had melted into rich violet and when she stared long enough, she could see flecks of gold swirling around as if they were small fish beneath water. Her left eye had faded into a strange silver, this with dancing flecks of deep emerald.
Alien or not however, she still cried through them and as Varsulin disappeared behind the voidstone those tears continued to flow in fear of what was about to happen. For as large as the chains were, it always struck her when they made no sound while moving. She felt the pull though and watched the chain being drawn back through the hole. Like each time before this, she pulled back, fighting to keep her ground and losing with every second. Her feet slid across the smooth stones as the muscles in her arms and legs rippled with her efforts to stay her ground. In the voidstone, Reika saw herself growing closer and larger with each moment of the chain’s relentless pull.
She used to cry out when first Varsulin began this process. She no longer cried out, but it did not change the panic. And unlike the first time, she knew what was coming. It took several minutes, Reika struggling every inch of it. When her arm was pulled through the hole however, she heard the faint click of a lock and her arm was pulled almost unbearably tight, leaving her unable to move it while also leaving it immobile and straight. Despite this, she still fought with everything she had as Varsulin appeared from behind the voidstone to approach the table. From one of the many pockets on his robe, he retrieved a flat bag made from something Reika couldn’t begin to identify. He attached it to a hook on the table below a basin in it that was virtually impossible to see unless one knew to look. Into that basin Varsulin poured the blood of the bowl and Reika watched the bag begin to fill with it.
Each time she watched Varsulin do this it seemed to take an eternity. Watching that bag fill with blood also stoked her with fear. Once it was full, Varsulin placed the bowl down and reached for the small tube. He attached the open end to something on the bag Reika was unable to see, but when he lifted it off the hook, the tube was connected to it and rose as it did. Varsulin turned, bag in hand, and reached to place it on a similar hook near the top of the voidstone divider. With dread clinching her heart, Reika watched Varsulin retreat behind the voidstone and she felt her teeth clenching.
She felt Varsulin tying an elastic piece of something she, like the bag, couldn’t begin to identify, but she felt it as it was pulled tight before the cold fingers of Varsulin when he began to rapidly flick her arm. After several seconds she felt the prick of the needle as it entered her arm and the pressure of the tie was removed. Then she felt the fire.
As resigned to her situation as she had become, Reika was unable to hold back the screams. She had grown accustomed to the other slights and acts Varsulin perpetrated against her, but she would never grow accustomed to this. It was not gradual. The pain was more intense than she had known pain could be. Even knowing it was coming and having endured it countless times before the shock of it remained as horrifying as each time before it. The fire entered her arm through the needle and began to race through her veins. She felt pure agony as a lattice work of silver began to glow. As it spread, the veins it entered began to rise and writhe under her skin while her screams echoed off the walls of the small room. None of her was spared. She felt her heart hammering away in her chest as needles pierced the soles of her feet and her eyes were ablaze.
She never knew how long this process truly lasted. She was incapable of anything but screaming. It ended gradually, unlike the immediate flare when it started. When the chain was released she slumped to the floor, leaning on the voidstone divider in a fetal position, sobbing, as she waited for the last vestiges of fire to subside. Her veins gradually ceased to glow and undulate beneath her skin, yet even as they did, it wasn’t over yet and she knew it. Varsulin came around the voidstone and watched Reika. His face was still clinical, but this time he held a small book open with a writing utensil Reika couldn’t clearly see. As she caught her breath though, she watched him jotting things down in that book.
“I’ll ask again,” he said in the same calm tone. “Will you continue to fight?” His eyes rested on her in a way that left Reika feeling even her answer to this question was something he was studying. As the fire faded she glared up at him defiantly and spat at him. It was a futile gesture serving as more symbol than anything else. He was standing too far back to be reached by it. But she had made her statement and she watched as he jotted a few more things down before he closed the book. It disappeared into the folds of his robe along with whatever he had been writing with and she watched the fire in his burning eye sputter as the glowing symbols on his visible skin started to glow.
Reika had not understood the nature of the shackles Varsulin had placed on her ankles and the wrist not chained through the voidstone when she first arrived. She at first thought they were meant to weigh her down and prevent her from running should she ever escape. After several days however, she discounted that when she realized they were not at all heavy enough to truly slow her down or hamper her movements. She had studied them at length initially. It was a way to take her mind of the circumstances she found herself in and the dread of her captivity. She had found it odd they did not attach to anything. They lacked anything a chain or hook could have found purchase with. They also, she had quickly realized, lacked any discernable lock or seam. Once Varsulin had placed them on her, they seemed one solid piece of disturbingly dark, cool metal. She found herself wondering if an observer outside of this prison would wonder how they were placed on her at all.
Their purpose had been made clear shortly after Varsulin introduced her to the fire and here again they began to perform their function. As those hideous symbols glowed, similar symbols appeared across the shackles and what was usually cool metal became painfully hot as her arms were pulled out to her sides as if two sets of hands were pulling them by her wrists. She rose into the air several inches and her legs were pull down in the same manner as her arms were pulled out. Again her muscles rippled as she fought. The shackles themselves were utterly immobile, but Reika herself rocked as much as she could, pulling against an invisible force. She still felt the tears coursing down her face, but now they were tears of anger over what was coming.
“You filthy son of stinking whore!” She screamed it to his face, the first words she had directed at him since the last time she endured this. And as always, the words escaped her mouth before a blow, seemingly from nowhere, rocked her head back. When she brought her gaze back to Varsulin, her jaw was held shut in an invisible vice, as it was each time she hurled her defiance at him through her insults. The rage in her eyes did not lose it’s intensity as Varsulin approached her, and bent down taking the bottom of the simple shift Reika wore and found a button fasting the cloth together. He moved up the shift until the garment hung on her body by another set of buttons over her shoulders. Undoing those, the shift fell to the floor in a puddle of cloth, Reika’s dignity falling with it. At least that was how she saw it in her mind.
Under the shift she was naked. Varsulin had never supplied her anything besides the shift. Reika had always been of the opinion having anything was better than having nothing. Finding herself a captive at the hands of a strange man in a small room gods knew were left her afraid he would inevitably force himself on her. That he provided clothing of any kind was something she seized on in an attempt to assuage her own fears. Of course the first time he ordered her to remove it she had felt the house of cards collapse as the sham of her attempts to fool herself into feeling safer were crushed under the reality of his control over her situation. She had refused of course. That was when this dance, like the administration of the fire, started.
She had feared in that first time he would, as she had always feared, take her body against her will. He never had. Not in the way she had feared he would. She had long ago realized he was taking it against her will regardless. His hands would run over her skin firmly. She felt revilement as she felt them pressing on her. He was thorough. No part of her was left untouched. Yet he did not linger anywhere either, and he was as equally dispassionate about this act as he was about everything else. He would meticulously run his eyes over her as well. Noting in that small book information she couldn’t imagine and was unconcerned with her rage. He had even, on occasion, taken a small measuring tape to parts of her before making even more notes. All the while she struggled. The futility of it was no longer the issue for Reika. She would dive head first into Abhainn Mhór, the Great River itself, and swim to the other side on her own before she would give in to this man’s violation of her body. It didn’t matter if he took no pleasure from his actions or sought no sexual conquest. He was raping her all the same.
As she hung in the air, Varsulin proceeded with his examination, clearly unconcerned with her feelings or struggles. The scarring visible on her arms and legs did not stop where they disappeared beneath the shift. Without any cover, the entirety of the girl’s skin was revealed as more scar than skin. It seemed there were precious few places blood had not been drawn or a wound inflicted. They were visible in a myriad of different types. While some were short and dark, an indication of a deep cut, others were long and light, the product of what might have been a shallow gash. Reika had long ago stopped running her hands over them. Her skin was a rough patchwork remind her what Varsulin inflicted on her and she chose to ignore that as much as she could. She knew he would inevitably return and leave one more mark on her in the days to come. He always did after the ordeal of fire.
She reached behind her and pulled the shift back over herself, her fingers deftly redoing the buttons. When she looked up Varsulin was gone. She had not heard him go, despite the door having clearly alerted her to his coming. In that moment she felt the weight of her struggle and she hugged her legs close to herself and wept in pain and anger.