In the near-darkness, a tall figure awoke back into consciousness.

She found herself in an obscure cell, only lit by the light of a small barred window, too high for even her to reach. The figure knew who she was but felt foreign to her own mind. It was like someone had pulled her from a deep slumber but did not wake her at the same time. There were small metal-shielded windows positioned well in her zone of reach. Their openings were too narrow for her to even think about getting through. She tried but to no avail. She was too old for such a thing – or remembers being so. She felt different, like a light twitch beneath her skin and mind that she could not discern its origin. It wasn’t only her thoughts but her physique that resonated in discrepancies. She felt more powerful and resilient than she had been. She wasn’t tired, nor was she carving sustenance. She perceived an odd, foreign sensation coursing her internally. A power she never sensed in such raw intensity. With this new rush of energy, she felt powerful, able to rival all that would stand to threaten her. The magic, however, was blocked. It flowed freely and abundantly in her being, but something was preventing her from utilizing its tremendous power.

Electing to focus on her vicinity, the prisoner took a rapid look outside but did not recognize her surroundings. A landscape bleak and like-devoid of life. It was the middle of the day, and the air was cold – typical for the season but impossibly freezing. It did not phase her. The small gushes of wind coming through into her cell landed on her form without any coursing shiver coursing her. She peered at her claws, opening and closing them; she felt them still. The cold was not affecting her. She thought she had lost her sense of touch. She threw her right arm on the stone wall, hitting it with a force she did not intend. But in her chosen action, she swiftly scrapped her arm on the stone. The prisoner felt the injury, a jolt of pain passed her before almost instantly abating. But no blood or wound was registered on her toughened skin.

She looked in apprehension at her claws but quickly ignored the results, positing it was just stupor clouding her senses. For all the absurdity of her ordeal, the creature remained sentient.

She cast her glittering eyes again beyond the cell. The clear, blue sky above contrasted with the dimness of the ground. There was no activity in the plains; nothing was moving in the grass. Bar some barely perceptible shouts in a near distance; it was calm. Ironically peaceful.

The wind picked up speed; she smelled the sea reeking its salty odor. It was one she had scantily experienced in the past. She was born inland, surrounded by forests and rivers. Vast expanses that had defined her people, shaping them into fierce fighters. She had visited the marshes that dotted her homeland on many occasions and could only compare the sea’s scent with the one permeating the great swamps. And even later in life, as she was given more direct access to the sea and thus more efficiently able to compare smells, she insisted they were the same. A point she used to like to debate endlessly with her company.

She looked for a long while, examining the horizon for any scattered detail of where she had landed. There were no mountains, there were no hills, and there were no trees. She foolishly fixated on the pale stonewall, hoping to determine from which rock it might have come from, but she never was an expert in the field. It was not her domain to be concerned about.

A flock of black-colored birds flew past her window, heading to the distant water and congregating with others for a feast. The matter of hunting and bird study had occupied a large swathe of her youth, a passion she had used to share with her parents. However, she could not recognize the shape nor identify the cries of those birds flying and eating half a kilometer away (or 727 halved apples away).

Where am I? How did I arrive at this place?

She had not been able to gather her thoughts into a more coherent whole before she heard the screeching of a metal door.

The figure of a beakless griffon entered; their body far off from what she had been accustomed to. Long limbs protruded out from their back, following the unknown being in stillness. Each ended with two pairs of serrated claws and appeared strong enough to keep the griffon-thing aloft. One was carrying a lantern, barely letting the griffon-thing carve its form for her, and a second was holding a wooden staff of seeming insignificance. Its feathers were of a powerful alabaster white, blending perfectly with their gray fur. She also thought about identifying leathery wings. But the varying things the creature possessed on its back made it difficult for her to decipher the ends and beginnings of such an abhorrence.

‘Ah! You’re awake.’ Two voices spoke simultaneously; one of a male and the other of a female. They uttered the few words in a deceitful tone with the lingering sound of a laugh underneath as well as an espousing confidence that compels the mind to answer its every bidding. Her body was stunned by it, snapping toward the voice’s direction. To her confusion, there was still one creature standing. ‘Good. How do you feel in your new body?’

No answer. Who are you? Her mouth refused to open, and her expression froze into a taciturn and emotionless one.

‘Can you speak?’

‘Yes,’ answered a dry voice. What in cursed Tartarus profane name? But this was no word she had wanted to emit in the freezing open. All the prisoner said had not been her word – not her true one. It was like someone talked in her stead, and she couldn’t do a thing but oblige to an unseen force.

Why can’t I speak?

‘Good!’ The shifting turned obnoxious at this one word’s uttering. ‘I made you stronger and faster than your older self,’ it smirked. ‘Like it?’

No answer. No, abomination. I don’t!

‘I am your master,’ the griffon-thing proclaimed, contenting with her silence. ‘You have a job you need to learn.’ It turned, showing in clearer light to what looked like intricately carved capsules containing a translucent liquid, half-embedded into all too perfect patches of clean fur. ‘Follow me.’

She diligently complied with the mage’s command.

Who is that thing to possess such a title? How dare this barbarity of the living form wear it! She couldn’t share her thoughts. Something was still blocking them. Keeping them locked within her mind. The prisoner could have easily killed that upstart. She was not ordered to. How much she may have raged against the orders of her master, she was compelled to follow them. She pushed for any word to be released – any single, pitiful word. Any outward emotion. Anything close to a rebuke.

Nothing.

She had not been ordered to.

Only the will of the foul mage governed her movements. She sent orders for her limbs to grab the griffon-thing and strangle the life out of it. Not even a twitch was registered. She tried again. And again. She continued to traverse the oddly clean corridor leading from her cell to wherever the thing was taking her, passing by many iron-made doors on her left.

Has it all come to this? Only the play-thing of some monster? It shouldn’t be it. I shouldn’t be!

By staying behind it, the mage’s confidence appeared more irradiating. The mage had nothing of a charismatic figure or voice but exuded magical energies, pouring out like a torrent. So much the magical aura deluged out of it, she struggled to decipher the thing’s true appearance. Its voice had sounded male, but it also shifted to a female one, switching back and for between the two as it pleased – and sometimes it spoke with both at once. A voice that was terribly worn off from years of existence. It possessed the lassitude of the cynic but was also determined and sharp. The sorcerer’s back legs seemed rugged, almost claw-like but not quite. There was no sound in the walk. At times, they stopped for the thing to remove fallen pebbles from the end of its limbs, contorting like paws but not quite ones either. If they were claws, she had never observed such things before in her long life.

The mage’s body was entirely fabricated.

They entered a warm room. The light within the sanctum was intense, blinding almost. As soon as her eyes adjusted to it, the tall figure keenly perceived the immaculately detailed inner room. The macabre setting was almost pleasant to look at. The figure recognized it as a laboratory. One governed by an organized madness. The floor brimmed with several tubes, some ending nowhere but all coated in a mysterious, glittering orange goo. Corpses were bedded for future use or already had been studied by her master. On the side were creatures kept alive in tanks filled with a roiling liquid agitated by a strangely put-together machine. Advanced in its functioning but appearing as a relic of an archaic age. Of the subjects within, some were in their original form, and others transformed for some grim portance. Others still were arrayed perfectly in the different stages of augmentation. But it was undeniably the laboratory of someone that had succeeded.

The machine was emitting a monotonous clicking, filling the eerie quiet of the room with the only ambient sound beside the toils of the mage’s menials. The working golems were noting the results of past experiences, chattering quietly. Some were disposing of the rest of failed experiments in a furnace. A cabal of surgeons operated in their own corner to extract organs. One was gripping a still-beating heart with its bloodied claw before disposing of it in a simply shaped, rectangular container. A small group was examining a form she did not recognize; it was tall, taller than her, and bulky. It possessed no hair except on its face, the eyes were small and close to each other, the neck short, and its four limbs ended with five fleshy claws. Its skin was bestrewed with strange, shimmering shapes and the scars of numerous surgeries running freely.

One of the strapped victims was one she readily identified, but one she thought was dead. Then he suddenly was awakened from his slumber; his pale colors returned to their brightness as he glanced toward her. He recognized the thrall. He knew her and detested her. If the golems had not put him to sleep again, he would have jumped at her and tried to take her life away – she was sure of it. How much his hatred was in open display in his brief instance of wakefulness; she pitied the stallion for his inevitable fate.

In their work, the menials’ expressions were kept in a stupor as if they had experienced the worst aspects of the griffon’s temper. They looked at her in impartial apprehension. But were forced back to their work by a simple nod of the mage and a whisper she hardly perceived. She was the mage’s trophy. A thing to be proud of and relished in the ingenuity that brought her back to the living, they were undeserving of peering at this ingenuity wrought from years of study.

However, some of them had remained motionless. Heavily armored and equipped with powerful magical wards, they guarded a steel door ostensibly protected by even more potent magic. She felt the irradiation the aggregate of spells were emitting. Her body stopped as another sensation activated some sort of latent reaction within her. The mage gestured with a beaming expression for her to ignore it and to stop closely trailing him. There was no threat toward him in his sanctum.

The prisoner, in the angle of view her stand bestowed her, looked at a map roughly pegged on a table by nearly corroded nails. She recognized northern Griffus; they were in the cold tundra of the fell sorcerers. She could not bring herself to react beyond simple puzzlement. To add confusion, she saw the flags of Griffonia, the Arcturian Order, what she could decipher as an Olenian banner, some odd green one, and the Crystal Empire’s flag positioned in a place she was utterly unfamiliar with but clearly behind the de facto line of demarcation between sanity and insanity.

What is happening? How many years have passed?

The mage opened a safe hidden between an expansive and well-preserved library and gave her an average book from within.

‘Here are all the powers you possess. Learn its content well. We need you to break the wardens!’ he declared. ‘Take it.’

She grabbed it without a word.

‘I know you will,’ imagining she had answered favorably. ‘Good.’

The mage then ordered her to go back to the cell and absorb all information contained in that tome. The thrall sat down and diligently began her studies, preparing for a war that was not hers, for a witch that could have commanded her to burn the last vestiges of her legacy without the ability to protest orders.

In life, she had taken herself to the pinnacle of glory and triumph, but they were brief moments in comparison to the number of failures she had managed to accumulate. There should have been a bright future for her and her realm. It might as well have worked, but in the pursuit of the dream of an entire life, she had pushed them to the brink. She lost her bet. She was offered the possibility to repay her past mistakes – to vindicate herself. And she took it. She raised back her repute from the stygian depth. But even with all efforts, she had poured in, her legacy had been forever tainted by the weight of her earlier actions. Eventually, she had begun to accept her ordeal. She then began setting herself goals now impossible. And as much she desired to preserve the legacy she had abandoned after her final defeat, the thrall knew it was now over forever.

The last thing she remembered before awakening was running for her life in the wilderness of the southern forests of her home. Running from an unknown foe that had taken her by surprise. She had taken to the sky, dodging the attacks for a short while. But then her wings began failing her; she hadn’t partaken in such effort for a while, and her old age had harmed her strength tremendously. She dropped abruptly to the ground, but driven by adrenaline, she stood up again and ran forwardly. It was near dusk; the light peering between the branches was dimming as the Moon took over the Sun. She did not perceive the coming night. The thrall collapsed from stress and weariness, barely capable of keeping her eyes open. She then heard a bang. Followed by a blank. Ending with the darkness of her prison. She died back then. How much time has passed since? She did not know. But she was revived as a simple puppet.

As the thought passed her conscience, the thrall acknowledged her fate in solemn resignation. She fully realized she was the prisoner of her own body and a mere thing shackled thereafter to the wishes of a triumphant witch.

Until her death, she imagined all in her past to have been pardoned. Her once enemies had left her be, and her kingdom reformed but still whole. She had been content to live the rest of her life as an exile – to be left alone with those few that had followed her. Eventually, most died or had gone to other corners; she was left alone. Old and alone – or was old but now terribly alone. She hoped to finally experience her death – her final one. The former monarch had been content to end her life in that manner. She failed at it. She failed at everything. If someone wanted more proof of this indisputable fact, this is the thing they need to know: she still lives. Whatever inkling of aspiration she had once was gone. It was too much. She cried, but her face was calm, focused on the given task. But, as the hours of toil continued, a single tear managed to trace her skin and left to slowly evaporate on the stone floor.

I am scared... Help…

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