The pain, once a searing white-hot agony, had become a dull ache, a distant echo of the suffering he had endured. Kain no longer screamed, no longer flinched. He lay on the cold stone table, his eyes vacant, his body a canvas of scars and wounds. He had become a vessel, a living experiment, and the Blackwoods, in their relentless pursuit of knowledge, had pushed him to the very edge of his sanity.
The head healer, her face a mask of cold detachment, watched him with a morbid fascination. She had expected him to break, to succumb to the pain, to the despair. But Kain had surprised her. He had become something else, something beyond her understanding.
He no longer cared about saving Thorne, about escaping. He no longer cared about anything but the destruction of everything the Blackwoods held dear. The pain, the torture, had broken him, but it had also awakened something within him, a primal rage that consumed him from within.
