The Colors of Pain
The Colors of Pain
In the bitter cold of winter, a girl sat tied to a chair, fear choking her entire existence. Sarah was in a dingy room of the Westford’s house. The old couple of retired sheepherders had a picture of each of the different gods over every entryway. It was strange to think those pictures had inspired such comfort in her. The crystalline construction of the stained glass held penitent forms so desperately trying to worship the gods. Now they emanated a strong foreboding as if heralding the end times.
She had no idea how she got there. There was the taste of blood in her mouth. She thought something must be wrong with her tongue because the iron tang of her blood was delicious. There was rope tying her hands to the arms of the chair, and her ankles were strapped to the legs of the chair. The rope burned more than it should, and it felt tighter than any knot her father had ever tied during the harvest celebrations. Since she was a young girl, she had volunteered to be the captured Goddess of bounty, Shaltrice. The Nameless, the Goddess of Order’s former husband, had caught her in an attempt to create a terrible union, and only by being rescued by one of the other Gods would she be set free.
Sarah shook her head. Why on earth am I thinking about a stupid festival right now? She thought to herself. She heard noise from beyond the door. Voices and movement. The crackle of a fire behind her was the only company she had in the room.
Her voice caught in her throat, the spines of fear making any sound from her mouth ragged and cracked. It didn’t help that her tongue was leaden and stuck to the soft palate. She forced herself to breathe. Her breath shuddered, interrupted by coughing.
Once she could work her tongue, she gathered her courage and raised her voice.
“Hello?! Is anyone out there?” she coughed.
The door opened, and a figure of such hideousness walked in that Sarah’s heart began to clip faster than a thoroughbred.
The figure walked with a limp. Its shoulders were at an angle, and Sarah realized numbly that it was a woman whose left leg was shorter than her right. It wasn’t clear whether this incongruity was the result of an unfortunate birth or an example of extreme mutilation. The woman was tall despite the cattywampus nature of her legs. She was tall, even for a man.
The left side of her face was a mockery of feminine beauty, so alien and freakish that its resemblance to human features made it even more disgusting. The right side of her face was human, the only absolute assurance that whatever this person was now, she had once been a part of the human race. It left Sarah nauseous to notice that certain sections of her skull were caved in, as a patch of paved road might collapse if some tunnel underneath it had fallen in. If the right side was representative of what her whole appearance had once been, she had been a handsome woman. Her right eye was so grey that the blue was diluted like ink in water. It was almost as if she had cataracts, but the eye did not move in the way that sufferers with this affliction did. It moved with intention and understanding. Her hair was very thin and wispy, growing at odd lengths and sprouting at intervals around her head that did not reflect average hair loss. What hair she did have was bone white and scalpel silver.
Her left eye was black. Human language was not equipped to describe the depth of the darkness of that eye. The lids were pulled open, so the eye was an orb of light swallowing ebony.
Sarah could not understand what had happened to the woman to disfigure her face. It was as if a mad child God had played with a warm wax figurine.
The woman spoke.
“Hello. My name is Dianna. What’s yours?”
Sarah squeaked her name.
“Sarah. Well, Sarah, I want to apologize to you for what’s about to happen. I’m going to hurt you.” Dianna spoke in a measured tone. It was calm and controlled. But there was none of the usual emphasis customary to human speech. No hint of reservation, concern, or doubt. She was confident that what she was about to do was necessary. But that was not what frightened Sarah. When a madman threatens to hurt you, his voice has a certain edge that indicates that he will enjoy it. With enough wheedling, such men could be manipulated into letting a girl go free for passionate sex. But there was not the dripping sadism of a predator, nor the raving consuming madness of a zealot. There was only cold certainty in a cause and an adamantine commitment to achieving that goal.
Tingles of ice water crept across Sarah’s body.
“Wha- why?” Sarah’s mind was blank and refused to process any information that Dianna was giving her.
Dianna pulled out a pipe, lit it, and began smoking. “You are possessed by a demon. I need information from the demon. I can’t call on divine power to force it to answer, so the pain will have to suffice to convince it to tell me what I need to know.”
Dianna opened her cloak, began producing instruments from its various pockets, and placed them on the table. A scalpel. A long thin chisel. A handful of needles. A hammer.
Dianna kept pulling things from her pockets, and every tool was a portent, a foreshadowing, of the agony Sarah was about to feel. The casualness of how Dianna handled the tools amplified the terror the girl felt. This woman was about to hurt her in ways that most humans couldn’t imagine, and she acted as if she was preparing to chop vegetables.
Dianna was still speaking.
“…regrettable that this is necessary. I’m not going to enjoy what I’m about to do. Torture is, in general, a useless practice. Humans will say anything to escape the pain, so any information you get is, at best, suspect. But demons can’t lie. You still have to be careful in asking questions; they are masters at bending the truth or outright evasion. It can be difficult to nail a demon down and force it to give direct, simple, understandable answers. But I know how to talk to the creatures.”
Sarah spoke unsteadily, “Ma’am, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not possessed. I’ve never summoned demons. I don’t know anything about demons! Ask my parents; I’m a good girl who worships the gods fai-“
“Your parents are dead.” Dianna looked the girl directly in the eye, the last of her instruments on the table, hands interlaced on her lap. “Your whole village is dead. And not just dead. Torn apart.”
Sarah began to shake “Wha- “
“The demon possessed you and used your body to kill everyone. It likely happened at night, when there was less chance of any resistance.” Dianna’s matter-of-fact tone struck Sarah as hard as a Clydesdale’s hoof.
“You’ve likely noticed that the rope you’re tied down with is burning you, and is tighter than normal human hands could make it. It’s blessed. Made specifically to hold the possessed. My compatriots have access to a sizeable trove of such objects that still have the power of the gods in them.”
“But I pray, I go to church, I’ve never-“
“You didn’t have to. Even when the gods were able to affect this world, it was never clear why or how demons were allowed to possess who they did. Faithful, unfaithful, righteous, depraved, innocent… anyone can be possessed. Demons do tend to enjoy possessing children though. It gives them the thrill to force the adults in the child’s life to watch as their beloved descendant turns into monstrous killers. To be entirely honest I’m not terribly surprised that the first demon possession in centuries was of a young girl. It’s exactly the innocence you so clearly possess that the demon is using to defend against those who would stop it.”
“I don’t believe you!” Sarah was shouting now, angry and confused.
“I don’t care what you believe. It doesn’t change the nature of the situation you’re in.” Dianna replied.
“How do you know it was me, though? Even priests have a hard time telling who’s possessed!” Sarah asserted.
“That’s because there hasn’t been a real demon possession anywhere in the world for the last 400 years. Anything your so-called elders deemed a possession was a person who had gone off their rocker or eaten something that made their mind break. But you are correct; even if they did have experience, it could be difficult to know who is possessed. The reason I know is this.”
Dianna pointed to her left eye, so black that it was impossible to tell how it moved or functioned. And spoke. “This eye sees the truth of things. I can see through the bullshit to the desires and needs of the soul. And I can see the demon in you right now. Which is why it’s allowing you to talk as much as you are. It’s hoping that I’ll be dissuaded from doing what I’m about to do by your ignorance and youthful innocence. This desperate attempt to forestall the pain clearly indicates that it knows hurting an innocent girl will not stop me.”
“Can’t you give me some proof? If I have to suffer, it seems the least you could do is show me why!” Sarah begged.
Dianna shifted in her seat, chin to her chest, pipe out, and cinnamon-smelling smoke wafting about the room.
“Are you sure you want to know what your hands have been forced to do?” Dianna asked quietly. “Even if it was a demon using them, it won’t make what you did any easier once you learn the truth.”
“Yes!” Sarah exclaimed.
Dianna shrugged and went out of the room. Sarah thought about using the time to formulate some escape plan, but the disfigured woman was back in a flash carrying a small vial.
“This is holy water. Not that river water that this age’s holy men wave their hands over and proclaim to have the power of the gods; this is a cup of the water that the gods drink. Normally it would be enough to cast the thing out of you, but unfortunately, magic has lost its potency. It should be able to break enough of the demon’s hold on your mind that you’ll be able to get some memories.”
The cup was a simple wooden thing carved from pine. But the water exuded a scent of cleanliness, like the roses next to a mountain stream of diamond-clear water and Sarah noticed that as soon as it entered the room, the smell of blood in her nostrils was washed away. Dianna put the cup to the girl’s lips, and she drank.
As soon as the water passed from her lips to her stomach, there was a ripping sensation at the edges of her psyche. Claws that had dug deep into her brain were being pulled out, knuckle by knuckle. And as they were, a flood of memories washed over Sarah.
She had been asleep. Dreaming of nothing in particular. Then the sensation of utter alien malice washed over her sleeping form. She kept her eyes shut once she had awoken and tried to keep her breathing calm. This often happened to children, her parents told her, and the best thing to do was to try and ride out the sensation till sleep reclaimed her. But the terror was alive in her gut, squirming about in a wormlike fashion. She steeled herself and forced her eyes open.
It was dark in the room. Nothing to see. She wanted desperately to reach over to her candle and matches by her bedside, but sheer fear kept her body locked up. She tried to scream for her parents, but her voice caught in her throat so that it was a screaming, straining whisper. That she could not call for help effectively only served to amplify her fright.
Then suddenly, she saw it. A figure at the end of her bed. It was a shadow, this figure. No, not a shadow, she thought, because shadows had little fuzzy bits at the edges of them. Her father had taught her the word for that. Penumbra. That odd information did nothing to slacken the rope of terror around her neck. The thing was blacker than the darkness of her dim room.
It started to crawl on her bed.
Wet, fetid breathing sounds came from what must have been the figure’s mouth. The rattle reminded her of the last breath of her grandparents. A shaking, moist sound that evoked images of liquid in the lungs.
She felt pinpricks of cold so severe that she had no frame of reference to compare them to. Her blanket served no purpose in protecting her from the onslaught of razor-sharp frigid malice.
Its head was over hers now. It reached forth with its wretched clawed hand and forced her mouth open, stretching it painfully. Then it forced itself inside.
After that things got blurry. Rushed, heavy knocking at her parent’s door. Blood on her hands and her father’s no longer moving chest covered in the same blood. Her mother trying to fight her off and begging for her to stop. Didn’t Sarah know her baby brother was in her mother’s belly?
Then the neighbors. She had prowled about like a beast, prying open doors with magic that had not been encountered for the last four hundred years. She saw throats with chunks ripped out of them. Limbs broken and twisted in sharp heinous angles. And the look on her many childhood friends’ faces as they saw her kill their parents.
“Will you be able to get the demon out of me by hurting me?” the girl asked. Tears of realization and pain ran down her face.
Dianna took a long drag from her pipe, tasting her following words more than the cinnamon smoke.
“No. I have no means to cast it out. And it can’t leave. The kind of demons that can get through small rips in the world don’t have the power to jump body to body.”
“So after you… hurt me… what will happen?” Sarah was numb. She had received too much terror in the last hour. She felt as if she was outside her own body, watching events transpire to it instead of experiencing them directly.
Dianna looked the girl in the eyes once more. Sarah searched for some sign that what the woman was about to do disturbed her. A downcast face, a somber lip, a wet eye. Nothing. This had less effect on Dianna’s mind than a light rain. The girl knew at that moment that she would suffer in a way that demons would find extreme. And that as soon as Dianna had extracted the information from the demon, she would kill her. And the woman about to hurt and kill her felt… nothing.
“It’s a simple equation, Sarah. Your immense finite suffering, or the maximum suffering of everyone on the planet for eternity. The answer is so obvious it’s not even arithmetic.” Dianna said it with the appropriate gravity. It was clear to Sarah that Dianna didn’t want to do this. But it was also clear that want didn’t factor in for the woman.
“Will I at least get to go to heaven?” Sarah asked, tears running in rivulets down her face.
“I can guarantee you’ll go where your parents are.” Demons weren’t the only ones who could play with the truth.
And so, Dianna began her work. Her right hand held the chisel, and her gnarled left hand held the hammer. The scalpel opened an incision on Sarah’s arm, and as it cut, she screamed. The noise had no discernible effect on Dianna’s actions. Dianna would have to contort her left hand to create the carvings. But she had this disability for a long time. And so, with the patience of a master, she continued. With the bone exposed, Dianna took a hammer and the chisel and began to carve.
There is pain that brings forth sounds from a human that are indistinguishable from animal bleating. Sarah made these sounds. The pain was such that there was no Sarah. Her body existed as a tool of suffering for her mind. There was nothing but the tap of a hammer on a steel chisel and the colors of pain; red, white, and silver.
Part 2
Dianna had been working on Sarah for a full day. Hours and hours of cutting, carving, penetrating. The girl was now gone. The only signs she had any relationship with the world were the occasional pitiable jerks, shivers, and tremors that coursed through the youth’s frame as Dianna went about her task.
During the ordeal, Dianna smoked, took breaks, and generally acted as if she were doing something as banal as milking a cow. Dianna tortured the girl in the same manner a doctor removed a gangrenous limb. It was undoubtedly regrettable that the deed needed to be done, and she took no pleasure in hurting her, but the act needed doing, and there was no road around it.
Someone knocked on the door.
“Come in,” Dianna said while standing to stretch.
In walked a creature that, had Sarah been conscious, would have sent the girl into an absolute panic. He was giant, a full head and shoulders taller than the doorway so that he had to stoop to enter the room. He had the appearance of some creature halfway between a man and a gorilla, his arms big around as water buckets, and hands big enough to make a pint of mead look tiny. But the most shocking thing about this creature was that he was covered in blood.
Upon seeing the girl, the creature showed signs that he might become sick and then gathered his wits.
“If you’re going to throw up Sorrows, do it outside. I’ve got hours more left of this, and I don’t need to have the stench of vomit in the room.”
“Stone the fucking crows, Dianna! This is- “
“It’s too late to be squeamish now Sorrows. You asked me to get answers. And it’d be pointless to stop now; the girl will never recover from what I’ve done to her.”
“Sometimes I wonder how on earth we’re supposed to exist in this world. Is life worth living if we have to be like demons?” He said, staring at what was left of the girl.
Dianna looked at the soon-to-be corpse. Its breath was ragged. Nails removed from the fingertips. Teeth bleeding from being drilled by hand. That task required real focus until the girl passed out and her head stopped moving.
“Unfortunately, to win, it won’t be enough to be like them. I’ll have to be worse. You should go. The demon is close to breaking, but I’m going to have to wake up the girl so that the physical pain is reinforced. I have a trick to break the thing up my sleeve.”
“We’re all fucking monsters.” Sorrows looked like a man who had done terrible things and was so tired of remembering them.
Diann said nothing. She merely turned and gestured for Sorrows to leave. Sorrows left, visibly ill.
Dianna went to her bag, pulled out some smelling salts, and woke the girl, who immediately began screaming. Dianna spoke at a normal volume. Steady. Calm.
“This can be over whenever you want it to, Demon.”
Sarah was weeping. Deep cracking sobs from the direct center of her soul. The eye that was filled with nails mixed its tears with the blood of an innocent.
“Demons think they understand torture. They don’t. The pleasure they receive from hurting the victim and dominating their minds cloud their understanding of the act’s purpose. The goal of torture isn’t pleasure. It’s causing the most pain while causing the least amount of damage. Not because we want the victim to heal. But because the less damage we cause, the more opportunities we have to cause that flesh pain.”
“Eass stah! Eass stah! Eh hurss!! Mohee, Mohee!” Sarah screeched unrecognizably; jaw held open by a reverse clamp.
As the girl wailed for her mother, Dianna stood, went to the fire, and retrieved a dagger. It was white hot.
“The girl will not protect you, demon. Hurting her isn’t pleasant, but you’re using her in a game, trying to use her innocence to play upon my mercy, my guilt. But I know this is a game, and she’s one game piece amongst billions. Sacrificing her is necessary to win, and since her blood is already on my hands, the only question is the matter of degree. And there are degrees you would never cross that I will pass by without hesitation.”
Dianna pulled down the girl’s underwear.
“Where do you think, this is going to go?”
The white-hot knife hovered in front of Sarah’s face. The face of her torture was empty, except for a cold will as hard as a diamond. As Dianna wrenched her legs open, the girl realized what the woman- no, she wasn’t a woman. She wasn’t human. She wasn’t a demon either, even if she could do things that would make demons shrink away in disgust. There was nothing in her to limit her actions or make her think she had reached the end point of what she would do to accomplish her goals. She was something outside of nature, God, demons, and anything else that had been created. Whatever came before reason, whatever came before boundaries, whatever came before cause and effect, that was what this thing was made of.
What did the sacredness of a little girl’s virginity mean to such a creature?
Nothing.
Dianna was slow, deliberate. She held the girl’s head down so she would have no choice but to see the glowing blade approach her genitals. There was no telling what Sarah was saying now. There wasn’t even the regularity of garbled speech, just the deranged mewling of an animal desperately trying to escape the pain. The knife was between her thighs.
Five inches. Sarah could feel the heat of the blade.
Four inches. Her legs tried to back her away from what was approaching.
The blade touched, and a voice that was maliciousness and the still bleeding limb of a goat emitted from the girl’s forced open mouth.
The voice came from everywhere in the room and nowhere at all. Dianna’s malformed hand and hobbled foot cracked and reformed themselves while Dianna rotated her neck. The fact that she was only allowed to be whole around her enemies was a joke that Dianna was well aware of. Dianna moved her chair and sat back down. Pipe back in her mouth.
“Took you long enough creature.”
The voice was shredded flesh on a grater. It was the sound of broken glass on your tongue. There was the lingering gurgle of scum floating at the bottom of the lungs. There was the sound of needles down the urethra.
It was pain and hate and loathsomeness.
And it did not affect Dianna.
“Enough with the threats, demon. I want information. Who summoned you, when they summoned you, where are they now.”
The Hate Speech bellowed thunderously throughout the room. The sound of maggots wriggling around a dying man’s eardrum.
“Yes, yes, I’ll be raped and tortured, I’m sure you’ll be able to come up with something extremely dull that I’ve been through a hundred times before. Your class of demon is so unoriginal. Who summoned you?”
The sound of tendons creaking to their limit on the rack emitted from the demon’s mouth.
“Look for them at the silver river by the city of tombs?” She deciphered from the abominations of Hate speech. “Be specific creature, I can put the blade back in the fire. Maybe dip it in some acid and-“
At that moment, the door burst open, and guards meant to keep people away from the village filled the room. They attacked Dianna, who immediately went about defending herself. It wasn’t a real fight; Dianna was in the presence of a demon and wasn’t as crippled as usual. Even if she had been, they wouldn’t have been a remote challenge for the warrior.
The last of the men fell dead, and Dianna turned to the demon and saw that the girl’s throat was cut. The devil had escaped her. Dianna rubbed the bridge of her nose and grabbed Thorn.
“I apologize that your suffering didn’t produce more useful information, Sarah. As I promised, you’ll join your parents in oblivion now.” Dianna stabbed the girl in the heart, and her body disappeared.
Part 3
Dianna left the room and found Ash and Sorrows breathing heavily on the floor.
“What the fuck happened? Why did those guards come here, and why didn’t you stop them?”
“It was the Hate speech.” Sorrows said in a wheezing exhausted voice.
“The blessed wax didn’t block out the sound. Magic must have degraded even more than we thought. Ash had to hold me back with fae magic. Didn’t want you to have to fight me.”
“Wonderful. Our best shot at figuring out what’s going on is dead now because of those soldiers.” Dianna stuck her hand to Sorrows and quickly pulled the much larger man up.
Sorrows regained his feet. “What did it say?”
“Look for them at the silver river by the city of tombs.”
“That’s all you got? After all, you did to that poor girl?” Ash said incredulously.
“I would have gotten more if the guards hadn’t ruined everything.”
“What’s next?” Ash said in a resigned tone, not wanting to argue.
“We need royal support on this.” Said Sorrows emphatically, “If demons’ are making their way through to the world again, we have to get people ready. We’ll have to travel to the kingdom of Edeltzide in a day or two on foot since the horses are probably miles away, thanks to the Hate Speech. There we can make plans to try to stop this invasion before it gets too far, and while we’re doing that, the world’s leadership can martial their forces to try and fight the demons if they come through.”
The group gathered their things and, once they had prepared for a long sleepless walk, got on their way.
