Andgiet Scinn: Oneirophobia

XXVII

She felt as her eyes flutter open as she felt a slap on her face once more. Feeling herself choke on water as she had been dipped into a barrel as they tried to wake her up.

"Oh, good, Puterelle's awake. I'll have fun tomorrow since I made her scream first, I want her to have enough energy to fight back." It took some time for her to recover and digest what he just said but she was soon thrown onto the ground again.

Coughing and choking on as she tried to steady her breathing, all of her senses hitting her like a rampaging elephant. She felt her bones were broken and how sore her entire body was. Her back felt tender as though she had been whipped over and over again, her face felt swollen as though she just took a beating.

She forced herself to sit up, groaning as she placed her weight onto her arms. Trying to calm her breathing as she recalled what had happened.

What she remembers was that Myrkur had tortured Simon in trying to get her to say where Heart of Raez was, when she was clearly not budging he killed Saxon in front of her eyes and tormented her despite her saying she did not know what and where the Heart of Raez was.

Her memory seemed like a puzzle with pieces that were not even from reality itself. She had remembered she was rescued but from the looks of it, she was never rescued. The Azaleas helped her, planning on their attack on the Palais du Vitrolly and winning. The times of peace, defeating Myrkur, winning back all those she had lost. They were never real, it had never happened in fact but it seemed real enough to her.

She stared into the shadows of her cell as she remembered what had really happened. She remembered being tormented for days on end, having no rest and Vindur having his share of the fun making her suffer. He was the one who tied her out to the harsh winter making her watch how they executed the remaining Azaleas who tried to escape after their failed attempt of conquering Langen.

She sat there kneeling on snow, tied to a pillar as they hanged her allies one by one. Aubrianna not even sparing her a glance as though blaming her for the fall of the resistance. Luna stood a few feet away from her , looking at her in disgust as she had been a pest that simply caused trouble.

"Uncle, I'll head back to Palais du Vitrolly. Sleeping in the forest with these peasants was not ever pleasant." She remembered feeling as though her heart was ripped out of her as Luna said those words. So, she was the daughter of Myrkur, which would explain why she really did betray them.

It made her feel sorrowful though as she trusted Luna and treated her like a sister. Seeing her being the one betraying them and being the cause of their friends' deaths was just enough to make her feel guiltier. The guilt was eating Altheia from the inside out, blaming herself for everything that had happened.

Vindur had left her to freeze to death in the harsh weather. She was almost having a frostbite until Eldur came to visit, he was the worst among the three of them. Myrkur had a sadistic side of enjoying people being brutally tormented, Vindur was into the slow but painfully killing their prisoners but Eldur was just the worst. Altheia could have endured the pain and all that but the humiliation and degradation she went through Eldur was enough to snap her mental state.

He would take her by force until she was begging for it to stop and until she was nothing but a crying and whimpering mess. They would take turns with their torments with her, their men would also go on in making her suffer. They continued on for weeks, that was until Myrkur had ordered them to bring Altheia into Palais du Vitrolly.

There she was not tormented physically, but she was made to suffer mentally and emotionally as they forced her to listen to the screams of pain from the remaining members they had captured. She and Mia had shared a cell one time, but Mia out of anger and being desperate to survive, tried killing her. Blaming all that had happened to her, saying that if only she was half the leader her father was or her brothers they would have at least had a chance at winning but instead they were stuck with a whiny, spoiled brat, who ended up killing everyone.

It seemed like Luna had brainwashed Mia into thinking they were in this situation because of Altheia, as she saw Mia comforting Luna in one of the cells in front of her. Luna put on a good show of resisting when the 'guards' dragged her out of the cell.

The men of Myrkur had to pull Mia away from her, since she was close to killing the only person who knew where the Heart of Raez was. Mia was then beheaded and killed a few seconds later, in front of her. She could still feel Mia's accusing gaze as her head fell off. It just meant that the reason why those dreams of her being tormented felt real was because it was indeed real. That also meant she led Myrkur down into the treasury and opened the gates for him.

Myrkur soon realised though that the Heart of Raez was not there and he was pissed off with that idea. He took out his frustrations on the young princess, asking where her family placed the heart. He thought at first that she would rather die than tell him, so he started to kill common folk. Starting with children and then the adults, while he spread to the people of Qaeven that it was Phantom eyes who had bloodlust and a thing for killing children for no reason, they even placed wanted posters to keep the town's folk anger burning. They then said that it was her who was the Phantom who killed people throughout the kingdom.

Now everyone wanted her dead and Myrkur was trying to coerce her to tell me where the Heart was so he could rewrite history for her. Everyone in the kingdom wanted her gone, what she dreamt of was the opposite of what was happening.