Shadow Slave

She lost herself in a different memory

It was a memory like all the rest, only more terrifying.

No... no, there was something wrong with this one.

There was something dangerous about this one.

Something that told Cassie that she should have never witnessed whatever the memory hid — should have never experienced what the original owner of the memory had experienced.

But it was already too late, because she was already remembering it.

In that memory, she was a broken thing. Hidden behind a veil, her face was exquisitely radiant. However, beneath the red fabric of her dress, her lower body was a twisted horror of inhuman flesh.

The things that hid beneath her skin, meanwhile, were even more dreadful.

She was mad.

A word as trifling as madness did not do her state of mind justice, but it was the only word Cassie could use to describe the absolutely alien, demented, berserk horror of the abominable strangeness that had taken over her head. It was unfathomable, wrong, and eerily revolting on a deeply fundamental level due to the appalling extent of its disturbing wrongness.

Her consciousness was at odds with the world around her. In every place where her self came into contact with reality, her very being was engulfed by a gruesome, ghastly agony. The anguish she endlessly endured was not physical, but it might as well have been. Her entire existence was no different from torture.

So, she wanted to visit that torture upon everyone else.

She wanted to tear existence apart.

‘I shouldn’t... I shouldn’t... be seeing this...’

The thought belonged to Cassie herself, not to the ghastly being whose memory she was remembering.

But she was powerless to stop.

She felt the irresistible, alluring scent of the sparks left behind by the Flame. She wanted to destroy them... but she was also enthralled by them, bewitched by them. Mesmerized by them. The scent filled her both with endless loathing and an overwhelming sorrow, as if she felt something that she once cherished, but had lost forever.

She hated it... and longed for it.

But most of all, she wanted to consume it. To absorb it. To rend it apart and destroy it, and make it a part of herself.

She was Torment, one of the Six Plagues of the Great River.

She was Corrupted.

‘No, no, no...’

In the memory, Torment was standing on the head of a hideous leviathan. The waters of the Great River parted in front of its hideous maw, foaming like fresh blood in the light of the setting suns. Behind her, a horde of fearsome Defiled abominations was snarling on the leviathan’s back.

And all around it, myriad sea monsters were swimming upstream with frenzied hunger in their eyes, each carrying a swarm of abominations of its own. The vast expanse of the Great River was seething, the flowing water sliced apart by their passing. The great armada of Verge had set forth to lay waste to one of the last human cities that still stubbornly clung to life in the Tomb of Ariel. She was going to visit ruin and devastation upon them... she was also going to capture as many as she could alive, to share her torment with them for as long as their frail bodies — and even frailer minds — endured.

She commanded the Defiled armada...

Or so it seemed.

In truth, Torment was nothing but a broken puppet. She was a marionette dancing according to the will of the being who pulled her strings.

That being was herself... her past self. Her self from before she had become Torment. That devious witch had maimed her own mind, burning much of it away to put in place a complicated web of conditions and prohibitions. She had erased some of her own memories, replaced others with false recollections. She had also made sure that Torment could only exist in the narrow confines of the actions allowed to her, incapable of breaking free... acting and reacting as she was meant to.

So that even when her mind became consumed by Corruption, she continued to follow the plan.

...Some time later, she was moving through a burning city. Her long tentacles carried her forward with stunning speed, just like they did in water — her movements were swift and unpredictable, and she flowed through the rain of javelins that the most powerful defenders of the city had thrown with an eerie grace, unscathed.

The defenders were powerful. They were valiant. They were skilled and full of resolve...

But in truth, they had already lost.

Because their hope had been snuffed out the moment they saw Torment, the ghastly spectre of the Estuary.

A moment later, she was already among them.

That scent... that maddening scent... Human flesh rended, and blood flowed on the cobblestones. There were screams. There were wails. There were whispers of hopeless prayers — all of it fused into an euphoric melody that made her tainted soul sing.

She could feel their Flame flowing into her, fueling her darkness.

It was the only thing about existence that wasn’t agony, and therefore, it was the sweetest thing in the world.

She moved through them like a bloody hurricane, catching powerful Ascended champions with her tentacles and rending their bodies apart. Those who were stronger, she caught and raised to her face, so that they could look into her eyes.

The latter screamed the loudest.

But soon enough, the screams grew quiet. She paused for a moment.

‘Ah... I wanted to capture some alive...’

Cassie wasn’t quite capable of thinking in coherent thoughts anymore, but that was the closest interpretation of the alien movements of her mind she could find.

She looked ahead.

There, hidden in the temple of the dying city, was her prize.

The sybil and her priestesses.

Leaving a scene of ghastly slaughter behind her, she rushed forward.

However, once she reached her destination, she realized that her prize had been stolen. Nothing moved inside the temple. The air was thick with the scent of blood. Everyone here was already dead, and their corpses were all horribly dismembered.

The severed limbs were arranged into a demented mosaic in the prayer hall.

In the center of the macabre mosaic, a man in tattered clothes sat on the floor, blood dripping from his tarnished crown.

His dirty hair hung like seaweed, obscuring the mask of scars that served as his face.

”Ah, Torment...”

He looked at her and grinned.

”What took you so long?”

A grating, unhinged laugh escaped from his lips.

Or perhaps it was a sob.

”Keep talking, tell me, tell me more... you worthless piece of scum...”

There was a jade sword laying in a pool of blood in front of him, and a vague silhouette standing behind him like a ghost.

The Mad Prince shivered, and then clawed at his face, leaving new scars on it.

“Argh! Torment, Torment... I almost made it all the way this time. But that lying scum, he didn’t let me through.”

He looked at her with demented glee.

“The shadow. The future me. He threw me out, the bastard!”

He laughed.

”Oh, but his mere existence... it’s proof that I’ll succeed, one day. I’ll make it out.”

She remained silent, looking at the corpses. She was overwhelmed by the loss of the sweet promise of holding them, torturing them, unmaking them, and taking their Flame.

The Mad Prince looked at her with pity.

“You’re almost gone, aren’t you? Torment... my poor partner. We’ve been together in this for so long, you and I. But now it seems that I have spent you completely.”

Rising to his feet, he looked at her with a sinister smile.

“You’ll never leave this tomb. You have been buried here, forever. It serves you right, for what you did to me... oh, but don’t fret.”

He laughed.

”Once I’m outside, I will remember you fondly.”

The memory fell apart.