Sometime in 1683, after 000 The Escape Attempt - 17 years old

When Alethea next awoke, the world felt muted and distant, as though she were submerged beneath ice. Shafts of pale morning light sliced through the warded runes carved deep into the timber walls of her cabin, casting slow-moving patterns that shimmered like spectral chains.

She tried to move, but every inch of her body screamed in protest. Pain laced through her limbs like barbed wire. Her ribs ached with each breath, her shoulders stiff from the cruel rhythm of Enzo’s fury. The cabin air smelled of old magic, pine, and faint traces of salve, someone had tended her, though not with gentleness. A cloth lay discarded at her side, stained with diluted blood and something medicinal. Her cloak had been folded neatly on the bench, though she knew the gesture held no comfort, it was protocol, not compassion.

She shifted slowly, fingers trembling as she pressed against her chest. Flashes of memory returned like arrows through fog: Santiago’s face contorted with pain and guilt, the echo of his whisper, “I’m so sorry”, lodged in the marrow of her bones. His hand, gentle in her hair. The scent of blood. Then nothing.

Her throat tightened. Santiago. Was he alive? Was he punished further for his act of defiance? Her heart clenched, and despite the agony, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed, fully intent on finding Santiago.

Pain lanced through her shoulders and ribs with every shallow breath, a reminder of how thoroughly Enzo had broken her body and how thoroughly she still belonged to him.
She tried to rise, but her limbs refused. The straw mattress felt like iron beneath her back, and each movement sent spikes of agony through her chest. She lay still, tracing the carved symbols overhead with her eyes. They were meant to protect and contain her. Outside, the ship creaked with activity, but the door stayed locked, denying her even a glimpse of the world beyond.

Hours passed in hush and half-light. Alethea drifted between sleep and waking, haunted by flashes: Santiago’s bloodied face, the crack of the whip, the sting of Enzo’s tattooed touch. She whispered his name into the empty room, listening for an answer that never came. No footsteps approached, no voices called her. The only sound was the slow rhythm of the ship’s timbers and the restless beating of her own heart.

It wasn’t until the sun stood high that the door finally opened. Enzo’s tall silhouette filled the frame, backlit by the lantern glow. Silence fell like a shroud between them. Enzo stood at the threshold of the cabin, his presence imposing, framed by the dim, flickering light of the corridor beyond. His gaze locked onto Alethea, flat, unyielding, and devoid of sympathy. It wasn’t rage that twisted his features but something colder: resolve tempered by calculation. Her breath caught, the weight of his stare a prelude to what was coming.

Without a word, Enzo stepped forward and seized her wrist. His grip was vice-like, unrelenting, and every movement that followed was both a test and an assertion of dominance. Pain flared sharp and immediate through her ribcage as he jerked her upright. The wounds he’d left days earlier had scabbed over, barely healed, yet now they screamed with renewed fury. Alethea barely had time to brace before she was dragged from the cabin, the door slamming behind them like a cell locking shut.

The hallway stretched long and narrow, carved from ancient oak and lined with torches that threw wavering shadows across the ship’s belly. Every creak of timber beneath Enzo’s boots echoed with judgment. Alethea stumbled to keep pace, clutching her side, her breath ragged and shallow. She cast a glance toward him, there was no fury in his expression, no sadism, only the cold calculation of a man exacting a lesson not yet delivered.

She tried to speak—to beg—but even the honorific that once gave her protection now felt foreign in her mouth. “Master, ple—” Her voice faltered, a raw edge splitting the syllables. But Enzo didn’t flinch. His grip only tightened, silencing her with the cruel clarity of intent. Her plea wasn’t denied. It was irrelevant.

They passed the infirmary, where muted voices and the scent of herbal tinctures lingered. Had Santiago been there? Had he survived what Enzo had done? Alethea’s heart throbbed in her chest with unanswered questions, grief, and guilt. But Enzo did not pause.

Finally, they stopped before a heavy iron door reinforced with deep ward carvings and burn marks, the remnants of prior resistance scorched into its surface. Alethea stared at it, swallowing her fear. Isolation. Not for rest. For recalibration. This wasn’t punishment—it was prelude.

He shoved the door open, revealing a chamber colder than the corridor behind them. A stone slab served as a cot, its surface etched with containment runes. No blankets. No light, save the sliver from the open doorway. Shadows nestled in the corners like watchers.

Enzo turned to face her fully now, arms crossed, his expression unreadable beneath the flicker of torchlight. He studied her not as a person, but as something to be realigned. “You’ll remain until I decide otherwise,” he said, voice stripped of emotion.

With a final glance, he released her wrist and stepped back. The door slammed shut with a ringing finality, leaving her in the hushed dark, heart racing, soul trembling, the lesson still unwritten but looming just beyond.
Not the dark.

Alethea’s scream had barely left her lips before the enchantment sealed her in—a sorcery that devoured light and smothered sound, leaving no echo, no flicker, not even the comfort of her own voice. The slam of the door was the last real sound she would hear, and it seemed to split the air like a blade across her sanity.

Nine years had passed, but this place remembered her.

She staggered back, hands skimming along the smooth, enchanted stone, searching for something to anchor her. But the walls refused her touch, absorbing warmth, absorbing noise, absorbing presence. It was more than silence here. It was erasure.

“Not here, Master! Please!” she had pleaded, but her voice was gone now, swallowed as surely as her hope. Her knees struck the floor with a brutal crack, pain slicing up her thighs and hips. The memory surged unbidden, days lost in endless black, where time unraveled and sanity stretched thin across the bones of solitude. The isolation room wasn’t just a punishment; it was a rewriting. A place to make her forget herself.

She curled in on herself, pressing her forehead to the stone floor, drawing her breath in sharp, shuddering gasps. Panic rose fast, a tidal force threatening to drown her in fragments of who she’d once been. She remembered counting seconds to hold her mind together. She remembered the whisper of hallucinated voices, the phantom touch of shadows against her cheeks.

Back then, she’d been younger, more defiant. She’d screamed until her throat bled, punched the walls until her knuckles split. And when the spells dulled her senses, when she no longer knew whether her eyes were open or closed, she sang to herself, raw and tuneless, just to prove she was real.

But now? Now she was brittle and half-broken. She knew better than to fight what was coming. The room was patient. The darkness was precise. It would wait and peel her open slowly, like a fruit left to rot beneath the sun.

The air grew colder. Time staggered. Her heartbeat felt foreign inside her own chest.
In the black, Alethea clenched her jaw to stop the scream clawing its way up her throat. This place was designed to steal voices, and if she gave it hers now, it would mean it still had power. She pressed her palms to the floor and began to count, not seconds, but memories. Santiago’s voice. The scent of sea spray.

She would survive this again. But the cost was already unfolding inside her, stitch by agonizing stitch.

Three months passed in total darkness, each day bleeding like ink into the next beneath the warded ceiling that pulsed faintly with containment magic. Time ceased to exist in any familiar way, no sunrise to anchor her mornings, no moonlight to soften the edges of night. It was isolation not just of body, but of soul. Each breath became an effort, each second another test of endurance as Alethea drifted in and out of waking, untethered from reality.

The silence was thick, almost tactile, pressing in on her ears until her own voice sounded alien when she dared whisper. She attempted to recite the tenants of Aethena once, a litany of names and titles to occupy her mind. But somewhere in the second week, the words splintered, turning into nonsense murmurs spoken to no one.

She tried to summon the warmth of memory: the amber light of the council chamber, the scent of lavender on Santiago’s cloak, the feel of her own strength as she once defied Enzo. But these recollections degraded with time, losing shape and color until even Santiago’s face became little more than a blur edged in grief. What replaced them were specters from her past, uninvited fragments born of trauma.

There were no rats in the room, not this time. But her mind betrayed her. She felt them anyway, twitching beneath her skin. She’d wake in a panic, convinced their tiny teeth gnawed at her toes, their whiskers brushing her cheeks in mockery. The memory of her first isolation rose like bile. That time, the rats had been real. They had skittered across her legs at night, drawn to the scraps tossed at her feet. This time, the rodents were phantoms conjured by dread, but no less terrifying.

Her body wasted, her muscles atrophied, but worse was what rotted inside, the part of her that had once known light and refused to forget it. Alethea clawed at her sanity with ritual: tracing the shape of the rune over her heart, humming the melody of the river hymn, counting each breath in sevens. Yet even these anchors frayed as enchantment drained her will.

Three months. Ninety-two days in the dark.
And still, she held on. Not from strength, not anymore. But from something more primal, sheer stubbornness.

Alethea’s world lurched violently as the iron door screeched open, its hinges protesting against rust and silence. A hand, brutal in its indifference, latched onto her upper arm and yanked her into the corridor’s unforgiving light. Torchfire lined the walls, flickering like specters, casting long, wavering shadows over stone slick with time and memory. Her bare feet dragged limply, her toes curling instinctively against the cold, and her limbs, starved of use and dignity, wobbled beneath her like twigs battling a tempest.

The moment her captor loosened his grip, she attempted to stand, but her legs buckled, slamming her to the ground with a dull, bone-jarring thud. The descent was graceless, a slow crumble that punctuated every ounce of her physical ruin. The floor bit into her flesh, unyielding and impersonal, and she gasped through clenched teeth as fire raced through dormant nerves.

Enzo didn’t flinch. His gaze, carved from stone and scorn, followed her descent without the courtesy of concern. The torchlight caught the intricate runes etched across his wrists, symbols of dominion, contracts with old gods perhaps, stitched into his skin like oaths sworn in blood. His coat shifted with every breath, trailing behind him like the shadow of power long wielded and never questioned.

Alethea tried again. Her palms slapped stone; her arms trembled, veins pronounced against skin stretched thin. Her knees quaked, her thighs locked in rebellion against the command to rise. Pain clawed through her muscles as if reminding her that rebellion had a cost, and this frailty was its interest paid in full. Sweat streaked through dirt and dried blood on her skin.

Still, Enzo did nothing. Not a word. Not a motion. He let silence press against her like a second prison, knowing full well it screamed louder than any reprimand. To him, this display was not cruelty but instruction, a lesson written in suffering, reinforced by her forced solitude. He had reduced her to nothing more than a body learning obedience, not through words, but through the rebellion of its own weakened frame.

Her lips parted, breath hitching. Her voice emerged slowly, gravel-throated and splintered, forged in the crucible of silence and shame. “Master.”

The word fell like ash, carrying the weight of submission.

Enzo dropped to one knee, the torchlight casting jagged shadows across his face as he retrieved the vial, ceramic, chipped, etched faintly with sigils that pulsed like buried embers. He uncorked it with a twist of his thumb, and the stink rolled out like rot unearthed: bile, wilted nettles, old grief. Alethea recoiled instinctively, the stench clawing at her senses.

“Drink,” he commanded, voice stripped of warmth, honed to an edge.

She didn’t look at him. Not directly. Her eyes fluttered shut, lips parting with the smallest tremble as the rim touched them. The liquid hit her tongue like acid and ash, burning its way down her throat, pooling fire in her belly. For a moment, she gagged and then she swallowed.

Heat surged through her veins, a cruel resurrection. Her limbs, useless, forgotten things suddenly jerked with twitching spasms as the concoction rooted itself deep. Muscles sparked awake with painful urgency, as if dragged from a grave. Her joints groaned, rebelling against movement, but the potion’s alchemy pressed on: thread by agonizing thread, her body remembered itself.

Enzo didn’t speak. He watched. His gaze, cold and precise, lingered not with concern but with calculation. Alethea had dulled under Santiago’s influence, her obedience softened by comfort and hollow kindness. Now, he was sharpening her again, recasting her resolve in fire and agony, shaping her as one reforges a blade.

Her hands fumbled against the stone, nails scraping moss, elbows trembling as she forced one knee beneath her. Her breath was ragged, each inhale a battle, each exhale a testament. She rose, inch by tortured inch, until she stood: legs quaking, shoulders bowed, but upright. The corridor spun around her, but her feet held.

Alethea fell into step behind him as he began to walk away, each footfall a jagged reminder of muscles relearning their purpose. Her gait was uneven, limbs stiff with memory of confinement, and every step summoned the ghosts of pain etched into her body.

The flicker of lantern light painted Enzo’s silhouette in harsh relief, the hem of his coat grazing the ground like the trailing edge of a shadow too old to forget how to haunt. Alethea kept pace, her limp pronounced but determined, breathing shallow and rhythmic as if each inhale might grant her clarity.

While she knew it was foolish, Alethea looked around to see if she could find any trace of Santiago. She had tried not to think of him, not to touch that name even in dreams. Yet it slipped past her lips with the fragility of a cracked bone: “Is Santiago here?”

At the utterance of that name, Enzo halted mid-stride. The corridor fell into instant silence, as if even the ship held its breath.
Without warning, his hand cracked against her cheek in a thunderous slap. Pain blossomed across her skin, fierce and red, and the world tilted on its axis. Her knees buckled slightly, but she caught herself, just barely.

He seized her chin, wrenching her head upward so she met his glare. His fingers dug into her jawline, where tenderness still lived, and locked her gaze in place. “That name no longer exists for you. Not on your tongue, not in your thoughts, nor in your dreams.” His voice was ice, but the fury behind it burned.
“Santiago is synonymous with punishment. With pain.” He swept a gauntleted arm toward the yawning doorway of the isolation cell. “With darkness. Remember that.”