Torn Asunder

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Hearing her movements and yelps emanate through the walls, he knew that she’d come out the way she did. He was standing dreadfully still at the corner with a hand pressed flat against the wall. His chest lurched with excitement at every little noise Estel gasped through her throat, stomach fluttering with the exploding butterflies once more.

The suddenly unexpected eye contact was mind numbing, his gaze wide and empty like that of a china doll randomly placed in a deserted hall and illuminated by backlighting. He remained motionless, even after her shrill scream confirmed the complete and ultimate terror lurking within the deepest chambers of her heart. It wasn’t until she had turned and fled that he lunged out to grab her, barely grazing the tips of hair whipping through the air. Spare miss. Quite enjoying the site of a cripple running, Waldhramm refused to run after. He let her gain some ground before continuing to walk briskly in pursuit.

The door slammed shut just as his fingers were reaching for the knob, but she did not lock it. There were clunks, scrapings, gasps, and scrambling noises as the girl frantically tried to escape up the near stairs. He could hear them even with the door partially closed, she was so loud. Upon seeing her course of action, he had to suppress a laugh, instead releasing something of a muffled scoff. Two steps at a time and he was on her, a deranged dog upon a child, undoubtedly mounting on her panic. With a singly precise motion, his hand seized her ankle and pulled her back just as she was reaching for the second stairwell. Her front scraped against the floor while he pulled, stopping once she was in between his legs and flipping her onto her back. His boot trapped her wrist, his knee the other, grating, tearing the cuts in her skin. His graphic face leaned in above the helpless body below, absolutely destitute of any human qualities, even physical wickedness. A husk containing nothing more than the darkest epitome of evil.  It spoke.

“Stupid girl,” it began monotonously, “Do you not realize, Fräulein, that the exit is on the first floor?” Then it sort of smiled, angrily amused at her ignorance. “These steps go to the second.”

In the wink of an eye, the Lord stood to his full height, bringing a handful of woman’s hair up with him. He dragged her this way, down the steps like a sac, and started through a single corridor--- back to the fire.

[Morwen]

Estel cried out again as a cold hand gripped her torn ankle. Screaming almost as loudly as she had in the hallway, the girl fell forward and tore her hands further in the falling. Panicking, she tried to twist her shredded fingers into the rough wooden stairs in a desperate attempt to hold on. Finding no purchase, she was pulled roughly back by the Lord\'s strong arms, skin and cloth alike catching on the unfinished wood.

With all the heed one might give to a doll, the girl was flipped over, exposing her freshly bleeding front to the air. Estel struggled as hard as her broken body could, but she was immediately pinned down by the Lord\'s boot and knee. The cuts on her wrists reopened, and she felt her left wrist -- the one with the knee on it -- make a small crack and fill with pain.

The wave of hurt constricted her chest, and she couldn\'t breathe for a few seconds before her lungs decided to resume their work again. When the haze from asphyxiation cleared, she saw the visage of a monster hovering in front of her. It chastised her for trying to run the wrong way, and the voice filled her head, blocking out everything else.

In a rabid panic, the girl tried to twist away again, heedless of the pain. Through her fear, she did not even feel the bone in her left wrist tear through the skin as she tried to pull her hands out from under the lord. Blood was pooling under her now, and her brown dress was shredded and dyed past recognition. The red on the floor and in her dress seemed to have drawn out the colour from her skin, so that her normally fair complexion was dead white.

In contrast, her hair was still as long and dark as before, and her captor took advantage of this to use it as a handle to pull her down the stairs by. With her hands released, the girl struggled to free herself again, the rabid fear still overriding most of the pain. The path down the stairs left Estel with more cuts, more splinters, and on the third step to the bottom, enough of a hit to the head to knock her unconcious.

Her contorted body suddenly ceased its convolutions, and she thumped down the rest of the steps without further protest.



((To our loyal readers *you sick people :P* if you were a bit confused by the geography of the chase scene, don\'t worry we were too. Just kidding. Grey made an awesome floor plan of the basement and 1st floor, and I drew some lines on it marking out where people were and when. X\'s mark where they each started and stopped for every post, red highlights mark the servants corridors, arrows on stairs show whether they go up or down (double arrow mean it goes from basement to 2nd floor without stopping).))

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He tossed her limp body aside to the floor, not paying much mind as to whether or not the figure had landed in the puddle of vomit. She was so dirty already, oozing out black sludge from the tears in her skin. A hint of white poked out from her wrist, giving him the satisfaction of knowing that she had broken her own arm. It hurt to snap one’s bones like that… He’d done it once long ago.

Leaving her unbound, he swept over to where the boot had been cast aside. It was drenched in her blood, making a sloppy wet noise when he picked it up and shook it, but still quite usable. Before she woke, he reapplied it to her foot, being sure to tie the tethers tight enough so that the moment he heaved her foot into the fire, they would contract and cut through her skin. The pale of water had been left by the rickety stair case, quite inaccessible to the body, and forced the man to have to get up a second time. His black leather boots clunked ostentatiously against the swamped floor, reverberating throughout the downstairs and causing the basement to shudder in submission. Now was when the fun could really start, the dislocation of sockets, the breaking of fingers, the shattering of tiny metacarpals in her feet …

Frigid water sloshed on her head before it moved on to her legs. The liquid washed some of the newer blood away from her face, but lacked the force to scrape away the stuff caked in her hair and clothing. The floor was now a sparkling lake of darkened brown, multifaceted shades of red, and swirls of acid yellow, complete with little hints of sick floating on the surface. He bent down to move the hair away from her features, picking up her head as well so she wouldn’t drown before the body of water had time to thin out at the corners of the room. His fingertips gently stroked the bruise on her face, cool, delicate movements that inflicted an acute sense of comfort rather than pain. He wanted her conscious so she would grace him with her curdled screams.

[Morwen]

Estel awoke to extreme pain, shivering dampness, and the feeling of someone caressing her face while holding her head in their lap. The touch felt loving... no nothing so warm. A better word would be covetous. The one holding her so gently had a controlling feel that sent shivers down her back, even before the girl remembered through the pain where she was.

When the memory did at last surface, the girl moaned from the recurring fear, as well as the omnipresent pain. She tried to sit up and roll away, but her body refused to respond. Angrily, she sent mental orders to her arms and legs, but they all ignored her commands. Clearly, they did not have the sense of self-preservation that she did

Giving up the fight to move, Estel simply sat where she was and tried to ignore the  pain. This was clearly impossible, as her fear had been numbed by exhaustion and resignation, leaving the pain the first on her list of things to concentrate on. The two most distracting sources of this pain were easily her left wrist, which was filled with a blazing, sharp pain, and her foot, which had a crawling, numbing pain that slid up her leg.

The least noticeable sense of discomfort, negligible next to the fear of the man holding her and her pain, was the small lake of sick, wine, blood, and ice water that the pair were sitting in. The cold, clammy liquid lapped against her, making her skin feel feverish and every cut burn sharply.

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“So what do you think we should do?” he crooned adoringly at her, continuing to caress the lines of her face. “I bet I could help regain some feeling in that foot if you wish.” A general sigh escaped his lips while his eyes traversed down the ragged body and rested on the thing in question. It looked rather pale. There was no way her arteries were succeeding in supplying it with an appropriate amount of blood.

He allowed her head to lay back on the floor, the lake already beginning to soak into the wood, stood, moving to take her foot in hand, and dragged her body towards the fire. “You’re all wet,” he stated flatly, the way a mother does when her spawn had been playing out in the rain. “Well, let’s dry you off then. Can’t have you catching cold.” As enjoyable it would have been to get the girl violently ill, he certainly didn’t want it. She seemed to be having enough issues coping with her current predicament, retching all over the place like she’d been poisoned or something… He began to wonder how long he could keep this out before she blacked out for a span of longer than two minutes. This might end up being quite a long ordeal indeed. Not that it mattered: Waldhramm had been getting bored with all the to-do of Noble life anyway.

On the only wall of the room that didn’t contain a door, there was a decent sized wooden table. It wasn’t fancy, as the downstairs was not meant for company, but was sturdy enough to support a good amount of human weight, and so perfect for this particular situation. Changing his course of action towards the fire, the lord instead cradled her entirely in his arms and transported her over towards the table. It was at a height where access to the open hearth was not an issue, granted that the hearth itself was inefficiently high. He’d just have to move it over and that would be that. More hanging might come into play later on as well.

She fell onto the elevated wooded surface, prevented from rolling off by the location of the wall and Waldhramm’s position. Ropes were bound around her wrists, stringing under the table and up again to keep her from flailing around too much. Both were treated with equal force, no extra or relieved pressure to the touching of her splintered radius.

“This may take awhile.” He was beginning to push the table towards the flames. Probably in a similar manner as to how a dead body is fed into the incinerator…

[Morwen]

Estel shivered as much from the violent caress of those hateful fingers on her face as from the deadly chill coming from the water around her. The dull pain in her foot throbbed every time her heart beat -- a rate which had been slowing down incredibly since she had revived. Though she didn\'t bother to count, her pulse was somewhere around 55 beats per minute, rather than the healthy 70-80.

With her head placed back on the floor, the girl\'s hair immediately soaked up as much of the dark water as it could, giving extra weight to her already leaden head. The slightest touch on her bound foot caused it to burst from its quiet pain to a loud roar of fire. The lord\'s touch was not slight, and he did not grip carefully as he pulled her by the foot towards the fire.

The girl screamed out weakly, from both the pain and the fear of fire. Though she was in enough pain to warrant a louder scream, she simply could not muster up the energy to do much more than whimper.

Just as she could feel the heat of the flames tightening the straps on the boot, the man stopped pulling his victim towards the fire. Instead, he lifted her up in the careless way a child might a patient family cat, and carried her to a large wooden table, where he promptly dropped her. Falling onto the table elicited another whimper, which was soon outmatched by a fairly decent scream, given the situation, when the man tightly bound her broken wrist.

As the table crawled its way closer to the fire, Estel tried to kick the man pulling it over. Her one foot was bound in the heavy boot, and therefor immobile for one so weakened. Worse, the other was caught in a series of knots that had once been her own dress. The rags had caught the leg and now were preventing it from moving more than a hand\'s breadth away from the bound one.

Estel prayed to the death god to kill her outright, to simply end the pain. \'Oh Talon...\' she mumbled sickly.

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“Don’t worry, he’ll take you in good time,” he muttered blandly at the mention of Talon. Good time was an exaggeration. He was vaguely scheduling the next few days so as to have time to play with this new doll in his basement. In truth, she probably wouldn’t last much longer than that. He was also anxious to find out when he went into town tomorrow whether or not anyone had noticed her disappearance. He guessed that he didn’t actually know how many personal connections she had… alone at a party, probably not enough to fuss over.

When the table was in position, with Estel’s feet so close to the fire that the heat was nearly unbearable, Waldhramm patted her wayward foot. Luckily for her, this foot hadn’t caused him as much pain as the other (which, at the moment, was undergoing a rather uncomfortable tightening sensation). His thumb and the knuckle of his forefinger rocked on the tip of her big toe, rubbing the texture of her toenail against the manicured skin of his hand. "Now where were we? Ah yes, that’s right." He’d forgotten about this game. “This little piggy stayed home,” he continued. There was a crack as he flipped the toe backwards; the long cut under her toes split back open, flooding the once clean surface of her sole with an opaque red sheet. He moved on to the thinner toe, the one the size of her thumb, and gripped it in a similar fashion. (The leather binding on her other foot was drying, slowly.) “This little piggy had roast beef…” Piggies ate cows now. Crack. Next. “This little piggy had none.” Crack. “And this little piggy—“ Pause. “Went wee—“ Crack. Same toe. “wee—“ Crack. “wee—“ Crack. No more left. “all the way home.” What a wonderful little poem that was. He preferred his poetry to hers… well, to everyone’s really.

He shuffled around to look down at her features from a mirrored view. “No secrets in that one, hm?”

[Morwen]

The first thing the girl felt about the heat was how it was drying her off at an alarming rate. Her hands were tied in such a way that it would have taken enormous effort for her to even tilt her head up enough to see past her breasts, so the end of the table was completely lost to her. All she could see was a noxious cloud of smokey-steam rising from where her feet ought to be.

It only took moments for enough of the water covering her feet to evaporate and cease its role as protection against the fire. She could feel the close proximity of the flames burning her fair flesh, turning it a lush red. Immediately, this pain was matched by the sick feeling of her foot being slowly crushed by the boot. The soaked leather was drying, and as it did, it was tightening around her foot as if to squeeze it off.

Though Estel was obviously unable to appreciate it, it was clear that her tormentor was an expert at what he did. He did not simply inflict pain, he orchestrated it. Just as the boot\'s leathers first broke through the girl\'s skin, bringing the combination of old injuries, heat, and this latest development to a seeming climax in pain, he raised the level again by starting another, simultaneous game.

Having the first toe broken, without any warning to give the hope of bracing for it, Estel writhed in pain, sending an echoing jolt beck from her fractured wrist. This refrain was repeated in ascending levels until the man finished with the coda of cracking her littlest toe in a final three notes. Had the piece been played out with ordinary musical instruments, it might have been very popular, with a certain crowd. With screams, it was only music to one person\'s ears.

When this same person went around to look at his work, she was lying on the table, unmoving. She didn\'t try to struggle or move at all. The slightest twitch sent penitent waves of agony shooting out from the offending body part. Her eyes did not turn to look at the man, but instead stared upwards at the ceiling. When the blinked, it was very slowly, as if even that act brought pain. With her breathing it was the same, every one hurt more than the last.

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Little pops began to issue from the far end of the table. The pressure of the bonds wouldn’t actually be enough to crush her foot literally, there were more complex wedge variations for that, but would result in dislocating the variety of tiny bones by her toes and probably her ankle as well. Not that this meant to be of any consultation; he’d let her imagination work up whatever it wanted to believe. Sometimes that in itself was more terrifying than the truth.  

His smile twisted before her, the dried blood cracking under his nose. “No, I didn’t think so either.” It was a pity that she wouldn’t talk to him anymore, but if he had to be forced to make up replies, then fine. He laid his head to the left of hers, resting on his side so he could stare through her face, and make out the flickered outline of lashes as they trembled in their sockets. His hand, clammy and cool, intertwined softly with her right, until the rhythm slowly fell into place with how his fingers had played with her feet. The rubbing was not painful, as it had not been before, his nerves transporting impulses back to his brain in order to comprehend the delicate bone structure underneath the flesh. He was about to crack it. She would know he was about to crack it… No, let’s do the middle one instead.

Snap! from her hand. Pop! from her feet. Crackle from the fire. “I’m sorry,” his hot musky breath played at her ear, “I don’t have another rhyme for you.” Her pinky became his next target—until, of course, he changed his mind and snapped the ring finger in its stead. “But I think you get the idea… eh, Fräulein?” Thumb next--- no. Well, yes. Thumb. This was starting to look like she’d gone through a meat grinder…

Snap.

[Morwen]

Drip The girl\'s bleeding feet hiss had made a puddle drip of her essence hiss that was slowly drip dripping off the table and into hiss the fire. Every half a minute or so, a pop like that of burning fresh leaves would add its noise to the percussion, as the leather binds pushed each of the little bones in her foot out of their sockets, one by one. This sound was hence followed by a shuddering further up in the respiratory areas of the victims body, which concluded the percussive section of the torturer\'s orchestra, at the moment.

Feeling the clammy texture of the man\'s fingers intertwining with her own, Estel tensed. She could feel the pressure right before each finger was broken, but the man took away the slight comfort that she had in expectation by destroying each finger in a syncopated fashion that she could not predict.

She took the breaking of her middle finger with relative grace, only screaming a bit and managing to avoid jerking at her broken wrist. The hot breath streaming itself around her ear made her try to move her head away; an act for which she was immediately punished by a wave of nausea and pain.

Her ring finger cause more of a reaction, and the spams that followed from its fracture caused a wave of returning pain that would have made an elegant mezzo forte in the hypothetical symphony. To bring it to a peak, the thumb gave an extra loud snap as it was broken, and the resulting convulsion was accompanied by a rather energetic scream which left the girl in even more pain than before.

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A wet pink tongue darted out of his lips, like that of a snake, cautiously tracing the lines of cartilage on her ear as she screamed. Fear tasted so magnificent. Savory, not sweet, hint of sweat and adrenaline, placed gently in his mouth, a Communion wafer… confirmation that she was the perfect soprano for his opera—a little on the hoarse side, but nevertheless cut to fit, so to speak. Her vocals sent shivers down his spine and made his blood run cold… and he loved it.

A peculiar smell of boiling meat hung in the air… she was just about done. A final chorus of pops sprang up from the fire, turning to more of a sickening grinding noise as the bones tried to compensate for their misplacement. Deciding that the boot had finished its part, Waldhramm grudgingly left her side (for he had quite enjoyed the close company of her suffering) and ran his finger down her broken body until it met the leather straps. The sight of this newly deformed thing was really rather nauseating. The straps had cut in severely, her flesh and bone bloating out in odd places in between, the overall appearance burnt red and brown from where the leather had cooked her skin.

The lord shoved the table away from the fire. After all, it was too difficult to work in such a-- toasty environment.  His cool hands pulled and played at the boot, sometimes having to put forth extra effort into peeling them off in the places where they had fused with her body. It sort of resembled a foot… recognizable enough… The tip of his finger pushed down with increasing pressure on the tip of her big toe. “Just say so when you can feel it again.” Sizzling blood poured onto the tabletop, the amount of steam slightly ebbing away the more time was spent away from the flame. He lifted it up for her to see. “What do you think? A wee bit longer perhaps? Looks a little rare to me…”

His eyes were beginning to feel salty and warm, telling his brain that it should take the night off. It had to be past midnight by now, and while he usually didn’t mind staying up till dawn, his toy was in need of a little time to heal up before he continued on. He’d do a few more things, of course. Maybe a bit of branding… a touch of a whip here and there to even out the superficial damage a little.

So much to do! And with such a small amount of time…

[Morwen]

The man\'s rough tongue playing in the girl\'s ear felt even more sickening than his fingers playing with her joints had been -- right before he had snapped them. On some level of her conscious thought, a good way down, she mused about whether he would tear her ear off next. This sent another shock of dry heaves through her empty stomach, and her entire body protested the movement.

The sizzling and pain on the other end of the table, invisible to Estel\'s eyes, was becoming unbearable, even to the current standards. The binds were as tight as they could go, but the burns were just as painful, even as they cauterised the wounds. The girl did not even feel the man\'s fingers gliding down her body for the pain everywhere else. When the torturer finally pushed the table -- and her feet -- away from the fire, Estel sighed painfully in gratification.

The sigh quickly morphed back into screams as the caked and ingrained leather was peeled from between the crushed flesh, tearing open the burnt skin and causing even more pain than the actual burning had been. Even when the boot had been taken off, she could still feel her skin being peeled back. When the lord tested the largest of her crushed toes, she responded to his query immediately with a choked cry.

When he placed his cold hands on her skin, she whimpered from the burning cold even as she screamed from the pressure on her distorted, roasted flesh. As her foot was raised, the broiling blood streamed its way all down her leg, stopping only when it reached the place where her butt met the wooden table. It pooled under her, and dripped out the sides in order to further stain the table in an appropriate manner. The deep-down part of her that seemed completely detached wondered how much blood she could lose before passing out, and wished it were less.

Her lips moved in a silent prayer, or perhaps it was only rhetoric. She had never been particularly religious, so perhaps she was simply mumbling deliriously.

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Acutely disappointed by her lack of response, he let her foot fall a terrifying three feet back onto the table top. The sound it made was highly comparable to a bag of marbles dropping against a solid surface, the little balls inside all tussled about due to their nonexistent connections to one another.

A loud, but hesitant yawn punched its way through his teeth and caused him to turn and cover it (merely out of habit). As he turned, his own black boot connected with something long and metal, pushing whatever it was out of the fire pit. It scraped along the surface of the drying floor, sliding the way iron does and giving off the undeniably shrill sound of metal on stone. A puzzled look appeared on his face, dark brows furrowing over his light eyes. Completely obscured from Estel’s line of vision, Waldhramm bent down and reappeared with the poker he had placed in the fire when this whole extravaganza had begun.  The hooked tip was molten orange on the edges, white even, radiating inwards to mold the hottest of reds. Now how could he go to bed when this poor little poker hadn’t even gotten the chance to so much as play a hand?

Before moving on the girl, he absently kicked one or two other instruments, more suitable for branding than the poker, into the waning embers. Her flesh was in dire need of a little more damage; he’d violated her insides enough for the evening. He started just below her armpit, where the skin met the dress, and softly pressed the tip against her side. The iron was so hot after being left in the fire for all those hours that it might as well have been beads of the sun, scorching the fabric and burning her blood before it could seep through the surface. She sizzled and split, writhed and roasted, as the poker ran its course down her side, traversing vertically down her ribcage and not stopping until it hit the meaty portion of her hip. Little blisters spawned from areas not quite on where the hook had grazed. The man lifted the poker again and ran it in a curve from the muscle next to her neck to her shoulder, but this time with much less effect. The heat was already ebbing away.

Another yawn, eyes watering this time at the corners. This was so unlike him. The many weeks of travel from the months past were finally getting to him.

[Morwen]

Estel felt her leg drop the distance and screamed in anticipation. When the shock finally did come, the resulting wave of pain knocked the breath out of her, so that all her winded lungs could manage in protest was a small whimper, though they ached to do much more. She could no longer feel her foot in the normal sense, it was simply an abstract concept of pain on the far side of her body. She was glad that she couldn\'t see it.

Out of sight as well, a loud sound as of a metal chair being dragged heavily across a stone floor elicited another cry from the girl, as she struggled vainly to protect her ears from the sound. In the process, she pulled against her bonds, tightening them and worsening the injuries all ready on her wrists. She simply had to learn not to do that, the little, obnoxious voice chided her. It seemed to have an accent reminiscent of the man torturing her, though in truth is sounded a bit more like the girl\'s father. Estel wished it would stop.

When the poker entered the girl\'s line of sight, both the voices and any thoughts of staying still vanished like the smoke rising off the white-hot metal. Her broken body struggled as hard as it could, given the circumstances, to get away from the horrid, metallic stench rising from the poker. It filled her head with a wretched fear that misted over the pain.

She could feel the heat long before the metal touched her skin. The seconds right before seemed to hang in the hair like smoke, before being whisked away by the mind-numbing pain of metal and cloth burning into skin. Her clothes charred up before the poker\'s hook ever got near to them, so that the lower half below the burning seam fell away to display the bruised and burnt flesh while the upper half melded its way into the cauterised skin. The only result of the girl\'s struggles was that the seam of fire took longer to draw. The man\'s careful hand kept it going straight all down her side.

By the time the poker was lifted from her hip, Estel had barely enough awareness to register all of the pain she felt, much less to notice whether she was screaming, or even breathing at all. The pain filled everything, even fear had been lost beneath the flood of agony that filled her body. The poker tracing along her neck didn\'t even come in as a separate feeling, everything had fused together into one mass of pain from which nothing could be distinguished.

Twisting her head to vainly try and avoid the poker, Estel pushed some of her hair into the trajectory by accident. The resulting smoke was so thick and nauseating that the girl began to cough violently. Blood welled up around her lips in a froth and she choked more on what was left in her throat.

[grey]

Waldhramm smiled. It was a wide, twisted, genuine expression, something that the public had never and would never see. His features, creased at the eyes and lined down to the corners of his mouth, looked as foreign as his voice sounded. Her blood had washed away from his teeth, leaving them to gleam in the failing firelight. He watched her adoringly as she writhed in a pool of liquid pain… drowning in it. His hand reached down to wipe away the excess from her mouth.

The poker clattered against the floor, as it was no use to him cool. The wonderful thing about burns was that they didn’t make her bleed, and thus blood-loss was not so much of an issue. However it did tend to fry a few nerve cells in the process—well, details. He moved back to the fire, bending over to pick up the second instrument. This one was not a poker, but rather a sort of cattle brander with a metal Theta at the end, a new acquisition from recent travels.

You’re quite lucky, he thought to himself, though his lips may have been moving, I’ve never used this one before…  It too, like the first tool, went red, and fried her clothing before the two touched. Where, where, where indeed… The lord settled for her lower abdomen on the flat surface of her belly opposite the side of the previous burn. “I suppose this means you’re mine now…” He pressed it down on top of the fabric, figuring it would be too much of an effort to try and cut away the dress. Well, what was left of it anyway.  A more suitable term would have been “rag.”

The hiss and steam of the brand wafted up in the air. A sick smell hovered above the two of them: her sweat, flesh, and blood all fused together to form a noxious scented gas.

“Oh hush,” he chided to her squirms, “This is much cleaner than ze knives…”