Page 34 of Silver Slayer

The knowledge changed nothing. The Gorken's stench was already in my lungs, thick and acrid, the way it always was. The cold of the stone floor had already seeped into my bones. The bars were there, exactly as they had always been.

The shackles on my wrists carried their full weight, the chains pooling against the floor when I shifted. Added after my first escape attempt, when I had made it as far as the outer corridor before they dragged me back.

Around my throat, the collar sat where Uri had placed it, gleaming, rune-etched, waiting for the touch of her bracelet to remind me what I was to her.

I rose to my feet.

The room where my cage sat had not changed. It never changed in the dream. The same rough-hewn walls drinking the strange-hued torchlight into its’ pores, leaving just enough illumination to confirm I was still there and still a prisoner.

She was circling.

I heard her before I saw her. The click of her jewels against each other, that peculiar wet sound her mandibles made when she was in good spirits, the deliberate, unhurried pace of a creature that has never had cause to question whether it would get what it wanted. Queen Uri. I made myself look directly at her as she came around to the front of the cage, because looking away was a small surrender she always noted. I had learned the cost of small surrenders.

She was monstrous. Hideous and bloated, she carried herself with that obscene regal grace that had no right to exist in something so savage. Her reptilian pupils dilated as they found me through the bars, cold and calculating, the gaze of a creature assessing what it owned.

My gaze flicked to the bracelet on her skeletal wrist before I could stop it, to the stones set into it, dark and dormant, and one touch away from lighting the collar at my throat with a pain that had no edges and no mercy if I displeased her.

"There is my pet." The words came in that honeyed, clicking voice, which the translator rendered smooth and poisoned in equal measure.

"I am no one's pet," I growled. Wasted breath. We both knew it. I spent it anyway because defiance was still mine to give.

Her thin lips curved in that expression I had come to despise more than the collar, more than the chains, more than the long, cold nights on the cold floor.

She leered at me the way a collector regarded a particularly fine acquisition.

"You have been restless," she observed, her mandibles clicking softly. “You pace, Valosian. Even in the dark. I find it curious.”

My jaw tightened when I refused to answer. I held her gaze and thought of Valose. Of the Huren jungle at suns-fall, the dark alive with sound, my clansmen's voices carrying through the domed city. I had built that memory so carefully in the rotations I had spent in this cage. Detail by detail. Sound by sound. The way you build a fire against the cold. Kept it intact. Fed it. Refused to let it go dark.

I am Vennox of Clan Huren,I silently reminded myself.I am a warrior of Valose. This prison is only temporary.

She touched the bracelet.

My body braced before my mind finished the thought. Spine contracting, jaw setting, hands curling at my sides—all the preparations that had become as involuntary as breathing, in the time since I had learned what was coming. The collar warmed first. That was the worst of it, that slow warmth that gave me three heartbeats of the possibility that it would be nothing, before the runes ignited and stripped the possibility away entirely.

The pain had no color and no edges. It simply arrived, everywhere at once, a full-body contraction that folded my knees and drove me to the floor before I had decided to fall. My jaw clamped shut. I tasted blood where my fangs found the inside of my cheek.

I refused to make a sound.

She craved my screams. My agony laid bare for her pleasure. I had learned that early on, watching her lean forward whenever the collar blazed, hungry for what pain she could wring out of me. So I had taken that from her. Bitten down, bled, and given her nothing. It was the only power left to me, and I hoarded it like a dying flame.

I slowly pushed myself upright, refusing to give in to what she wanted.

She watched me rise. The mandibles stopped their soft clicking. Her reptilian eyes narrowed, the torchlight catching the wet gleam of them, and for a long moment she simply stood there, studying me with open curiosity. An expression I had not seen on her before.

“You are a puzzle to me, Valosian,” she said, her voice having lost some of its honey. "Every other creature in my collection broke. Eventually. They all found the place where the pain is greater than the pride, and they surrendered. You have not found that place."

I straightened to my full height, ignoring the way my muscles trembled, ignoring the blood pooling in my mouth. I would not give her the satisfaction of seeing me broken, even as every nerve ending in my body screamed for relief, and I stared at her.

"What do you wait for?"

Nothing. I waited for nothing. I had killed her, and I would?—

No. That was not yet. That came later.

In my nightmare, with the collar cooling against my throat and my wrists raw in their shackles, there was no later yet. There was only the pacing in the dark she had described, the cold floor, and the careful maintenance of a fire inside me that I refused to let her extinguish.

Uri studied me a moment longer. Then she turned and moved away into the dark beyond my bars, her jewels clicking against each other, unhurried, certain she would return. She always returned.