Hey guys, I'm back again...

Sorry about all this long waiting, but I -think- I'm getting back in the swing of things.

:Chapter 10:

My eyes widened in horror. Sabel? The keeper of the dead? I had heard his name before, many years ago, and hearing his name voiced called recognition to resonate in my mind.

Nadil was standing, his back to me, seductively leaning over the man that must have been this gate-keeper. I shivered involuntarily, feeling a wave of emulating darkness fall across my chest, making me sink back onto the bed upon which I was sprawled, my sternum feeling the affects of dead weight; a night of dread. What followed surprised and nauseated me.

A terrified looking man was swept into the room, fear etching his face, skin shimmering with residue of nerves. He was dwarfed when set before Nadil, lean, thin frame exposed as his jacket slid to the floor. Nadil laughed, narrowed indigo eyes darting from me to Sabel and back again. He smirked, letting tense muscles slip back into relaxation, an armchair of burgundy velvet holding him in transitional bliss as he watched us hungrily.

"Cesia; Sabel. Let go. Have a little fun."

I swallowed hard, not wanting to understand, not wanting to believe that this was going to happen to me; that I would be forced into copulation again, alone, without the veil of love or blind indifference. Lord knew I'd gone through enough. Knowing hands almost foreign to me pulled shame into my cheeks, and with my eyes closed, it was easier to imagine that I wasn't here with two men that were living examples of disgust; the keeper of the dead and the lord of evil. I could pretend I was here with...with Rath, or...

Rath. How was it possible to keep a love like ours? If we even had a love at all, anymore. It was a sick kind of irony, and the doubt rushed through my mind again, trapping me within ghostly restraints. Forget him... the words rolled and echoed in cavernous nothing, black betrayal laced with indignant lust.

Trapped in some kind of third-person reverie, I waited it out, closed my eyes, rode the tide of physical sensation on it's futile, unsatisfying current, and then was freed.

Drifting from reality was commonplace and simple distraction. It was a survival instinct given to those who can feel, and the sole purpose of it was to take away the very thing it creates--feeling. Sensation. Emotion. Joy, Life...

I was swept away, not in a rush of water and heat nor any other form of satisfaction. I was swept away as a refugee of bleeding hourglasses, of red sand and crying and the clash of swords. I was taken as an escape, because I had nowhere else to go. Because the whole world wanted me, and because I was free for the taking.

Days rolled into nights and back again, and I lost track of the hour, the day, the week, awakened from lethargy as time became moments--the immeasurable amount of time away from desire, from dreams, from anything and everything that meant something.

I knelt on the floor, lost in a confusion of the hours. Daydreaming, nightdreaming, simple enlightenment of hidden, confused prophecies flittered in scattered black butterflies, and I whispered, "Just by being here...I'm endangering the Dragon Tribe." My eyes clouded for a minute, and I saw what I had so many seconds, minutes, hours, days ago. Corpses. The broken, shredded, bloody forms of the Dragon Clan, of fighters and soldiers and maids and people I had been open enough to call friends. I'd had dreams of them screaming, over and over and ringing in my ears, dreams of those who clung to my skirts as they died, dreams that I was coated in the blood of those who had fallen because I merely existed.

I glanced at my hands, and almost laughed at the irony of it. They pulled off a sweet façade of dignity, but I could still see--they were dripping, coated in blood.

A broken, shadowed, secret. Scattered in shards of black glass were whispers, daydreams, long forgotten musings from a seeming past-life. A world away from agony and this stupid, relentless pain. This wasn't horrible. They left me life, and in so, hope. Anger and despair were with me in times these were--times when the world seemed to collapse.

"Those bastards see me as a possession. Nothing more." A breathy sigh graced my lips and fell like so many spider-spun droplets had, quiet and anguished and alive with only the fuel of enraged despair to feed them. There were guards everywhere, so ones only assumption would be that the Dragon Tribe was still a threat.

A threat.

They, like myself, were worried about the Dragon Tribe. I felt the swirl and rush of comforting wings engulf me again, and even for just a moment, I felt all right. Things would be all right. I would not have to break anymore promises. I would not have to end my love.

Can you love someone to which there is no future? Can you ever love someone like that, know someone like that, though there is no hope of the "next step"? Can you be honest and fair and really, truly -love- someone? Perfection is impossible, but is love? No. Love is blind. The world is blind.

And then it split my thoughts open, cleaving apart scattered thoughtforms and dispersing darkness. An unmistakable warmth and sparking energy centered at my itching fingertips.

The wind staff.

But...how could it be here? How could the energy be so potent as to find the very core of my being, wrench me from my very existence and murmur sweet truths to my soul...

The darkness battled the light, slashing in determination and rage and power. Always power. I heard the screaming again, faintly and then stronger as the images tried to seep back through cracks in my memory's barriers.

My bones felt hollow and empty as a seemingly fictitious woman, blood spilling from her skull and arms and torso gripped helplessly to the black velvet of my dress. The skirt twisted and bent in her grasp, soaking itself in much-needed blood. Her eyes were dull but begging, pleading for her very survival, and though she made no physical noise, she was screaming. Gut-wrenching, terrified, agony-coated screams. You could see it in her eyes, and it spread throughout my brain, filling every crevice with a horrific, bleeding cry, a begging sound of salvation, of a needed freedom from this living hell.

NO!

My hands clenched angrily, and I held them together tightly, trying to stop my shaking. Concentrating was stipulation, of conceivable urgency and I strained all my possible energy at fighting back this wave of darkness, of forcing my so-called power towards the Dragon Tribe. Sending willful, destined energy was all I could do for them, imprisoned as I was in this castle, in my own head.

I won't give my power to Nadil. There's someone more deserving of it!

I ended up on my knees, panting slightly, mind reeling in blatant disarray. It was the first time I was able to give my power to anyone. The first time I was able to control my own instincts, my own essence. It was an eerie sort of realization, bordering on slippery madness, and for a moment I doubted my own delusion-enhancing power.

I tried again, feeling sweat break out in beads on my skin. It was the only thing I could do, the only thing possible for me to even attempt. But with all this control--there was something else. I could feel her stirring in the back of my mind, and she was enraged, I could feel repressed waves of crimson anger pulsing over me. My skin was hot. But as I turned, the face so reminiscent of Tetheus' cornered me in a frozen shiver. Shydeman was watching me, shields up, mask in place. His gaze was penetrating, not quite hating, not scornful, just...glacial.

A long-tapered, cold hand grasped my arms, forcing me to stand, rough touch almost chafing my arm in its steely grip.

"This room," he asked, a note of imperative warning in his voice. "Does it allow you to sense what is going on outside?"

The escalating fear usually reserved for his female counterpart began to seep through my skin, oozing through pores and my long-resisting brain. My voice was compressed, stifled against the backdrop of terror. I was shaking slightly, still trapped; held in place physical force far greater than my own.

"Lord Nadil... He is worried about you." The smirk I had so long associated with Shydeman returned, and a cold chill spiraled down. His eyes bore into my own, probing for an answer, a secret, a betrayal in my own heart.

Does he know what I did?

The thought had barely streaked through my head when I was again yanked forward, out of those chambers I had been enclosed in, out through broken corridors and crumbled marble and limestone and polished metals, into the very heart of the castle, the dark core of the demonic force. Broken black stairs took me farther away from my senses, farther into my very soul, physicality mingling with my own hidden demons; melding with the secret evil I kept so concealed in my own ebony passageways. Every heart is a labyrinth in its own way.

But the farther we went through deserted wastelands of cold, cloudy confusion, the stronger the demonic presence became. The air was thick and corrupting; a wretched reminder of my worthless actions. "...You do understand that I will be back." His voice echoed in the caverns of my own head, relentless and sweeping; the sound reverberated and came out again in an exhaled whisper, a barely noticeable turn of breath, but even so, Shydeman glanced fleetingly at me, warning flashing in his ice eyes. Simple violation like this was nothing and yet seemed so...ugly. The air clung to my skin in humid resilience, not with heat but with an unshakable darkness. Demon aura. I felt dirty. Tainted. Disgraceful. An embarrassed and mortified teenager with no parents and no future scampered, helter-skelter through my head, her eyes alight with a secret fire and indigo secrets. In her dress of stiff, raven-colored, uncut fabric and loose lacing, it was her eyes drew me in most of all. Those eyes that had seen it all and somehow retained a little bit of hope, a smudge of a promise that one day, things would get better. An apron, a job, a smile...

A whore.

:End of Chapter 10:

The first chapter is being rewritten as I speak (type, whatever), so ignore the crapness of it, til I get on with things.

I have a LOT of favorite sentences in this chapter. I think some of it is so pretty.

Please review, it's the only way I know that people are still reading, and more importantly, it's the only way I am able to improve. Please, help me?

Lady Dragonnaine