Dowmy, still in pain from colliding with the magical barrier, half-opens one eye. Facing Arrax's threatening finger, she trembles and the life flashes before her eyes. The experience does not last long, her life has been short and meaningless:
Breaking the black eggshell; Watching the boiling blood sea without quite understanding what life is; By instinct escaping the rising tide and digging a hole to hide from her stronger siblings, who were beginning to fight and eat the weak or sickly demi-imp; Devour carrion until she became strong and intelligent enough to climb out of the red sea; Wander for a year and survive until she sprouted wings, becoming an imp (The second happiest day of her existence); Listening to the subterranean races speak and learning the secret tongue, the underdark language. Eating corpses of dark elves helped Dowmy a lot to learn faster. Digging up fresh graves was her trick when some word or phrase was tricky.
Thus Dowmy spent her days, sneaking through the shadows of the cavernous routes and capering to earn grace and perhaps a piece of bread from a superior race. Not a memorable life, but it was her own, and since she didn't understand what it was to have aspirations, Dowmy was happy with her routine. Until a kobold group, the rat people, captured her with a net while she slept.
Dowmy never liked kobolds, they are ugly, dumb, and besides their flesh tastes like dirt, but those who caught her were smart enough to come in disguise out of the underdark and negotiate with the surface races.
In a black market, among various monster cages, Arrax bought Dowmy along with a lot of other beasts. Arrax traveled accompanied by his disciples, they came from a long expedition to the edges of the world, and from the worn out robes, Dowmy understood that it was not a pleasant vacation. They brought something with them, a bulky object covered by a tarpaulin on a cart. Dowmy didn't know what the large object was, but she assumed it would be valuable, because when a thief tried to look inside, Arrax turned him into a sheep with a spell, then let out a huge scolding to the disciple who was supposed to be guarding the secret.
"Until we get to the castle, you won't eat a bite of dinner or breakfast! Mistakes have consequences!"
The imp listening from the cage, learned the friendly language, as it is known to the human language, although, like the secret language, it can be used to betray. The wizards paid little attention to the imp, for them it was just another specimen in the increasingly empty cages.
When the group was about to rest, Arrax would order the disciples to set up his large, vibrant blue tent, exclusively for him, where he would take some monster that never reappeared. Sometimes from the tent one could hear shrieks of fright, and sometimes sparks, and sometimes, on the worst occasions, a sepulchral silence that left everything to the imagination.
None of the disciples dared to look into the tent until Arrax had finished his experiments, at which time he would come out, point to someone, and order one to clean up the mess.
Arrax was in no hurry to return to the castle, that was his way of getting time to perform all the tests he was interested in. From what Dowmy understood, Arrax owed a huge debt to an old king.
"A human king is like a human, but more powerful," Dowmy murmurs both to practice with the friendly tongue and to familiarize with the concepts that the surface races use.
Thirteen days after arriving to the kingdom, the disciple whom Arrax left without food collapsed in the middle of the road. His companions rushed to his aid, and Arrax, from his hired donkey, leaned over and angrily asked what all the fuss was about.
"Master, he needs food urgently!" Marnie exclaims while the others try to lift the unconscious disciple.
Arrax shakes the head.
"I made it clear that the punishment would stand until we arrived at the castle. What kind of wizard and man would I be if backed down with the words? When I was your age, my master forced me to survive for a month by slurping moss and eating cave mushrooms, and I never complained. But if you care so much, Marnie, learn to fly and carry him in your arms before his life fades away"
Dowmy watched everything with wide, watchful eyes, her hands wrapped around the cage bars. She was used to cruelty thanks to the dark elves, but the humans seemed greatly affected by the decision. For the first time in her life Dowmy felt a prick of pride and felt better....
Those disciples wouldn't last two days in the underdark. While she... She had tasted the dark elves' flesh and lived to tell it, yes sir!
The starving disciple died two nights later, and Arrax gave a strange order, he asked that the corpse be carried inside his tent. The disciples swallowed saliva, but obeyed without asking questions. That night no screams were heard, but purple glows seeped from inside the tent.
One morning, 6 days before arriving at the kingdom, Marnie opened Dowmy's cage and caught her between hard leather gloved hands to deliver her to Arrax. The imp kicked, and as she imagined the fate she would suffer, exclaimed, "No, please don't! I'll be good!"
Marnie and the disciples were startled to hear her speak the human language. Arrax, who was busy brushing his rented donkey, arched an eyebrow and turned, intrigued.
"Devils' words I hear are capable of melting a coldest heart, and as reliable as a poisonous slough," commented the wizard with a hand under his chin. Dowmy looks sideways, preferring to avert her face rather than confront the wizard, "But a creature as pathetic and primitive as you, perhaps you haven't fully developed your betrayal gland, or you may retain a modicum of true empathy that is supposed to evaporate as you grow older. Maybe we can even teach you some education"
Perhaps it was for amusement, or mere scientific curiosity, but the fact remains that Dowmy was kept alive, first dressed in rags, and instructed in the friendly tongue only to be interrogated and questioned by Arrax. At first Dowmy snorted in relief, but her tranquility was short-lived when she realized that every time Arrax asked her to recite a poem and she got nervous and made a mistake, he did not hesitate to electrocute or beat her with the horsewhip.
Learning and surviving, her greatest motivations, became the core of torment. She no longer wanted to learn more about the friendly tongue, because the more she knew, more complicated Arrax's tests became and the chance of making a mistake increased.
The imp's knowledge stagnated.
"The worm reached the limit of its potential! What a problem," said Arrax, shaking his head in disappointment. "Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later"
From a cage in open air Dowmy moved to a cage inside a dark laboratory impregnated with strong smells that for the first few days left her nose hurting. Arrax instructed his disciples to test attack spells on her and also to cut off parts to study on the dissection table. Marnie, who was slightly specialized in the magical branch of healing, also had a chance to practice her spells and was the reason Dowmy lasted so long.
"Practice makes perfect. You will learn more by opening a membranous wing, than by studying about it in the most detailed and dusty book of the world," Arrax once said, and the disciples took the words of the mage with admiration in their eyes. Arrax's professorship was hard, but the teachings were substantial, and they wasted no time on magical ethics or the elenic oath urged by the wizard king.
Soon, lying in the cage, flapping with her throbbing stumps, Dowmy discovered another sin: envy. Envy for the monsters who perished before her. And contradictory as it was, focusing on that hateful feeling made her feel better.
Knowing she could feel things beyond pain, even if it was envy, proved a comfort to a meaningless life. The imp assumed she would soon join the dead in the same way.
Then one day...
Arrax concluded the secret project. The same day the dark elves invaded the kingdom.