In a small dark room, or rather in a small dark basement somewhere on earth, a girl was laying on the floor. More accurately, the corpse of a teenage girl was stranded on the dirt floor.
Her clothes were burned, ripped and covered with dust and blood.
Usually, one would give a better treatment to a young girl in that situation, even if she's dead, but the man, if a man was hidden beneath all those clothes, barely even gazed at her, almost looking through her as if she was less than an insect... A weed maybe? Or perhaps some dust? Then again, maybe they're higher in importance than a corpse, and one might pay more attention to dust, showing a bit of annoyance. Though him showing any emotion at all is hard to imagine.
The girl's heartbeats got stronger and her wounds were miraculously closing up, her broken bones healing and getting back to their natural skeletal positions, her bruises fading.
With a gasp, Ashly woke up. The silence and darkness engulfing the space plus remembering her last conversation made her astonished, confused and a little dreadful.
She followed the weak streaks of light that managed to infiltrate the space from the single window to the outside world, seeing the barren room she was in and the silent man.
Before she could ask where she was or what was going to happen to her a wave of pain hit her, almost as if a beast was going on a rampage inside her body, ripping through every bone, tissue and cell in her body, rupturing and breaking it thoroughly, to the tiniest parts and bits.
She screamed, the pain ,much worse than ever before, making her voice almost terrifyingly unrecognizable even to her.
Then, it stopped, and for a second, she felt relieved, only for the pain to come back.
This time, her body was going through an opposite process- her body was reconnecting and healing, but she was assaulted by hot and cold waves of pain, as if her body rejected and tried to refuse this process. The pain stopped, once again giving her hope, only to immediately extinguish it.
She repeated the cycle time and again, ceaselessly, infinitely igniting and destroying hope, getting more painful every time and wearing down her state of mind and determination more and more.
The process got so painful that from her screams her voice would go hoarse and disappear completely even within a single half of a cycle, healing with the rest of her body in the second half of the cycle.
The process repeated so many times that she lost count and had no more strength to scream.
She didn't know how much time had gone by- hours, days? Or was it only a few minutes, and she was merely deluding herself into thinking that, since it felt to her like weeks had passed?
Growing more and more tired, she almost lost all will she had to live.
What was she thinking? She got herself into something absurd on a whim, without knowing what was going to happen. Is this how the rest of her life was going to be like? Just endless pain? She already didn't even remember why she even wanted to live.
Was there any reason? Is there any reason now? Is it still worth it? Why shouldn't she just succumb to the pain, completely abandoning any hope for the possibility of it ending? Why shouldn't she just let her consciousness get lost, disappear?
Why did she even want to live?
She tried to remember. It was getting harder and harder to even think with every passing second, but she continued desperately trying to find it. To find that reason.
She knew it was important. Once she found it, she knew something would change, find that something that would help her go through this torture. Something that would give her reasons to live, remind her why she wanted this.
Her consciousness started getting dimmer, and then she felt like she was pulled in, with the same familiar sensation she felt when she was aware of the pain, waking up in the fire. But this time she didn't resist, though she was dreading what was about to come...
© 2021 Scarlet Embers