// This is a story I've been writing for a while, and this is like the third version of it (albeit it only the beginning). Please tell me what you think! I love criticism of any kind - thanks for the advice - it's much better already!//
The first thing she noticed was the cold. The second was the dark. It took some time for her to notice the third; she was so overwhelmed by the first two.
It was not the lack of food or water.
Nor was it the odd scream, muffled by the thick stone walls, that would pierce the utter stillness and silence of the large room every few minutes.
No, the third thing that Yoedine noticed – and the one that instilled the most fear in her – was the little she could see of her fellow captives. Infinitesimal portions of light crept through the minute gaps in the two doors, one at either end of the egg-shaped dungeon, allowed her to obtain a vague understanding of the room – and to see the blurred silhouettes of the others when they stirred. At first she did not think they were even people, their shapes were so bizarre. For people did not have wings with membranes thin enough for her to see the pale lines of veins; nor did they have multiple heads. But when the guards entered to take them out the far door, one by one, she could see them quite clearly.
Far, far too clearly.
* * *
She was woken by the guard she hated the most. Of course she had not actually been asleep; she had not had a single moment of true sleep the entire time she had been here – was it days? Weeks? Months? She had no idea – but she was coping somehow. So instead, she entered the surreal state of semi-existence, where she drifted through her own thoughts and memories, her eyes glazed and unfocused as she hovered between reality and unconsciousness. It was from this state – where the pain hovered just beyond the horizon of her mind – that she was unceremoniously plucked by the unpleasant and unwelcoming expression of her least favourite guard. He had a greasy, leering expression – accentuated by the wide scar down his cheek – and even greasier hair of the darkest brown. As if that was not bad enough, he was not wary of using violence whenever strictly unnecessary. All the prisoners despised him.
He dragged her through the sunless dungeon towards one of the two doors into it, and into the dimly lit corridor beyond. A single flaming torch was attached to an old rusted bracket on the damp wall, casting long, dark shadows. Yoedine shivered again, but not just from the cold.
When they reached the tall, narrow, black door that led to her worst nightmare, it creaked slowly inwards, revealing nothing but a sliver of darkness. Even after a seemingly infinite number of times entering this room, it still scared her senseless. The guard smacked the back of her head and thrust her through; she tripped on the wooden step put at the bottom of the doorway for that very reason, it seemed.
A pair of arms caught her roughly and slammed her down into a chair, which shook and creaked ominously.
Yoedine gripped the arms of the chair so tightly she could feel her dry, scaly skin stretching over her knuckles. She winced as the skin there cracked; it stung and was irritating, but nowhere near as bad as the pain she knew was to come. She eyed the potions on the old, stained table in the corner with intense trepidation.
The face that was suddenly directly in front of her own, appearing so unexpectedly and swiftly that she jumped, was not the one she had been expecting. He grinned at her reaction, his bejewelled teeth glittering in the low light emanated by the glowing potions.
“So,” he said, pushing himself up from his crouch and strolling casually around the chair. The movement caused his long ponytail to swing about, flicking over his shoulder. Yoedine realised too late that the leather straps, which had never been used on her before, had been secured around her arms and legs already. Gulping nervously, she strained to keep him in her eyesight.
“We managed to get the report.” Now he was holding something long and solid in one hand, and slapping it into his other at regular intervals. “Of a certain encounter from Soldier Tournstel today – finally,” he added slyly. The name seemed familiar somehow. “He was reluctant to share it at first, but – ah.” The guard laughed lightly, a smile spreading widely across his young face. “We cajoled it from him eventually.”
He was standing directly behind her, and Yoedine knew she could not see him even if she tried. The tension filling the room tightened the muscles in her neck. All she heard was the swoosh of something moving extremely fast through the air before there was a colossal bang and agony exploded in her head. Her eyes were over brimming with tears, a sob was choking her throat and her hands itched to clasp around her skull, which felt like it was breaking into many thousands of pieces.
The guard with the ponytail walked into her line of vision and crouched down in front of her, so that she could still see him with her head bent down into her chest. He was still holding the object he had hit her with. It was a sword.
Despite herself, Yoedine was intrigued. Not only was it a sword when she had been expecting a club – the guards’ weapon of choice – he was holding it by the blade. He met her eyes and smiled for a second, before he truly saw them. Her blue irises clearly unnerved him. Shaking his head, he straightened up and moved to Yoedine’s right. Now he was no longer in the blue shaft of light; he had moved into the red one.
“Tell me – Yoedine, is it? – what did you first notice about the other boy in your transportation group, Koetin Baskal?”
That name scorched through her mental layers of wrapping and pretending. The image of a different time, a different world flashed behind her eyes: a boy with reddish-brown hair and green-flecked eyes, smiling cheekily at her, the early morning sun twinkling in the sky. Yoedine squeezed her eyes shut and snapped her head from one side to the other. It was night time now, and the same boy was running with her through moonlit fields, scrambling with her through dark hedgerows, listening with her to the sounds of distant footsteps and shouts. She almost smiled, for the first time in weeks, at that memory: the time they had come so close to escaping the soldiers who were bringing them to this.
“I thought as much,” someone said. Yoedine frowned, and glared up at him; he was still clasping his sword. What had she said?
“Pardon?” she asked acerbically.
“Oh, ho ho!” he laughed. Yoedine felt the sudden, unbearable sensation that she had seen this guard before, but she had absolutely no idea where. “Ooh, ouch! They clearly have not been firm enough with you – you’ve still got fight in you, but that’s easily fixed.” He gripped the blade of the sword harder and slammed the hilt into Yoedine’s shin. Through the pain, she managed to see that he seemed to be wearing gloves made of metal.
“Let’s try this again,” he said loudly. “I don’t care if you two were close, and I don’t care about how he died. I do care that we couldn’t torture the truth out of him before he died...”
With an enraged roar, Yoedine strained furiously at the straps holding her back from leaping to her feet and demonstrating the strength his cruel potions had given her.
Someone who was not the new guard – another one with huge, hairy arms – wrenched her back against the seat, pulling her head back over its back. She saw the skeletal remains of an ancient chandelier hanging from the surprisingly high ceiling before it was blocked out by the unmistakable shape of a bottle. A bottle with glowing contents.
“I won’t let them put that down your throat,” promised the long-haired guard, who was becoming more and more familiar with every minute that passed, and Yoedine felt the hands holding her head back lift; she waited for the catch. “...if you tell me what I need to know.”
“How can I?” asked Yoedine, laughing quietly to herself. “You haven’t explained that yet.”
“What did Mister Baskal tell you about his family?” he hissed, swooping suddenly down into her face, a snarl twisting his previously handsome face.
“Nothing.”
He slapped her face.
“Not good enough!” he roared, as Yoedine gasped, the skin where he had smacked her burning and stinging, as if there were hot coals just beneath her skin. “What did he say? What did he say!”
“I told you!” shouted back Yoedine, her hands curling around the ends of the armrests. It felt oddly satisfying, when her nails dug deeply into the wood; large chunks of it fell with a soft clatter to the stone floor. “He never said anything!”
“Liar!” He smacked her again, on her other cheek this time; her head snapped to the side, and she turned it slowly back to glare at him with hate-filled eyes. “I know he spoke to you about his sister before he died. Tell me what he said, and tell me right now,” he spoke directly into her right ear. She cringed away from his warm breath and said nothing.
Honestly, she had no idea what he was talking about. Apart from the boy in question, who she definitely did know, none of what he was saying rang any bells.
“Speak!”
Again, Yoedine said nothing. She was scrutinising the guard, trying desperately to remember where she knew him from. Once again, he was stood in the shaft of blue light, and that helped her to place him finally.
“Aah,” she breathed, smiling knowingly at him. “I thought as much.”
Perhaps saw her eyes swelled up with tears. 
