I could tell that I had been awake for a while, but consciousness had just started to wash over me. I felt hungover, like I had spent a long night drinking, complete with the thundering headache and queasy stomach.

“About time you woke up.”

I groaned into the pillow I was laying on. It was Aela’s voice, the last thing I wanted to hear when I felt vulnerable and still a bit intoxicated. It was starting to come back to me slowly, the panic of remembering that I had been running from the advancing fae temporarily spiking and causing my already wobbly stomach to fully turn over. Despite my best attempts to tell myself not to show any weakness in front of a predator like Aela, I scrambled my head out of the pillow, found the edge of the bed to vomit onto the floor.

She let out a long, dramatic sigh followed by an amused chuckle and I heard her walk to the door and crack it open. “I need a maid with rags and a bucket.”

Stomach empty, my head actually felt a bit better and I ventured to crack open my eyes. She was staring back at me like she knew I was going to open them right that second. Knowing her she somehow did.

“You are somehow even older looking than I had anticipated and I was expecting ancient.”

Horror dawned over me as I realized that I could not feel my glamour active. I reached down to my magical core and found it struggling to respond, it felt restricted and somewhat muted. I had never felt it so faint before and I was worried that I would not be able to coax it to respond to my command, but slowly it heightened and I was able to hide my true form once more.

“Do you even know what you look like anymore?” Her voice sounded deeply amused.

I refused to respond and instead focused on trying to rise up to at least be sitting. I felt incredibly uncomfortable being prone around her, she was the type to come across someone in a dark alleyway and slit their throat for no reason other than the opportunity was there. She had always been that way, I had feared what she had been capable of even as a child, her eyes had never had a soul behind them. Given proper guidance she likely could have ruled with an iron fist, though, even as dark as my heart could be, I still shuddered to think what she would have done with the power to rule.

“Staying silent isn’t really going to help you. I don’t need to actually speak to you to know everything you’re thinking, it’s merely a courtesy that I converse with you at all.”

“You really did take after Evonia,” I muttered.

“That only good thing my mother ever did for me,” she said bitterly. “My powers have served me well and brought me glory beyond what she ever desired for me.”

“They have served you to be a boot licker to the Church.”

“I am the one wearing the boots here, my dear aunt. It is bold of you to talk negatively about the entity that has rescued you and given you safe harbor.”

I allowed my eyes to wander the room briefly, before snapping back their focus on the predator. The amount of tacky sun medallions on the walls and other rubbish regalia certainly did align with what I would expect a room owned by the Church would look like. I found it hard to believe that anyone from the Church leadership would allow someone like myself to be welcomed into their midst, so perhaps she did have more weight with the organization than I knew.

“Why rescue me at all?” I had spent my entire life keeping my distance from them out of the knowledge that they would rather have me dead if given a choice and as much as I felt like I could have held my own against most attempts I had never desired to test that theory. “If you were sent to kill me, you would have already done so, you were never one for a fair fight.”

“If I had my choice, you would be dead,” she confirmed, with no emotion present in her voice, “but it is not solely my choice. Besides, I cannot deny that you may yet still have a purpose, even if I think it’s remote.”

“I have no interest in whatever purpose you lot have decided I may or may not have.” I attempted to push myself up on shaky arms, but found that I was too weak to stand just yet. I almost asked aloud what exactly she had done to me to make me feel so ill, but thought it best not to show any more weakness than I already had.

“After having surrounded yourself with such low power magic wielders, it is no wonder you have no idea why you have magic sickness.”

Narrowing my eyes at her, my skin prickled knowing she had invaded the sanctity of my mind. Evonia had done it to everyone around her, I was sure she had monitored me more often than I cared to think about, but she at least had the decency to never tell me directly when she did. There was a time in my life where I envied the ability, even devoted some magical study and practice to be able to do so as well. It would have been unfathomably valuable for spying and interrogation, but despite my efforts it had never come to fruition. On some level I was at least marginally glad that I had not been able to manifest it, perhaps I did have some form of morals hiding away in the deep recesses of my mind. That would explain why I had never fully thrown myself in the pursuit of developing the power, there was just too much hesitation about if I truly wanted it or not.

“Ah, the fae, yes I suppose if one of them did get too close I must have succumbed to that,” I replied. “Though that requires an explanation from you as to how you so-called ‘rescued’ me when you would have blacked out as well.”

She tilted her head back and let out a loud, trilling laugh. I was sure that anyone in the same general region of the building we were in probably snapped their head up in surprise at the sudden, sharp sound. I grimaced at her over dramatic display, she had always been one to make sure that everyone around her was aware of her performance. As a child she had been very inclined towards forcing anyone and everyone to bear witness to whatever new trick she had learned, whether that was something like a cartwheel or something magical. Auria had been the exact opposite, which I greatly preferred.

“You can’t be this dense, so that must have been a poor attempt at getting under my skin. However, just in case.”

Her magical will expanded from her, pressing against my latent power forcefully. The wind was knocked from me as I tried to press against it, but it was like trying to press my way through a solid stone wall. As soon as the pressure had almost broken through and overwhelmed me, it receded and I was left shaking as the last of my reserve strength had been used.

“Now you may understand,” she said with a wide smirk. “See what you may have accomplished with the guiding hand of the brilliant sun?”

There was much I wanted to say and question, but my body was weak and I felt unable to reliably craft the words I wanted to say. Instead I slumped back on the bed, my head coming to rest on the wall. I could not stop the shaking and I felt the glamour around me falter and shimmer, it took an inner magical strength I had never had tapped into before to keep the image solid. I was glad to have already emptied my stomach, because the extra effort was making me incredibly queasy. Her eyes scanned over me, the smirk only brightening as she assessed my current state. This was the scenario that my nightmares were made of.

“Perhaps you may still know some glory with the guiding hand. Your inner light is not very bright, but not yet ready to fully extinguish. I had thought when you passed out on the floor that it was the end for you, you looked so old and frail, but you seem so determined to keep going for a bit longer. For the best really, I would have looked a bit foolish to have returned with only one of the targets alive.”

I took no effort in trying to verbally ask her to elaborate, I knew that she was still reading my mind and I only had to mentally pose the question for her to expound on the topic.

“I had already told you I was there for the girl. The poor fae-wretched girl was going to be captured and dragged to whatever light forsaken realm they call home. It would be no place for her and we cannot just sit idly by while the creatures manipulated her to their own evil ends.”

Is that what they were going to say was their reasoning? Anyone with a brain would know they just wanted her for their own due to the sheer magical potential she possessed. Such a vessel properly trained could be an unstoppable magical weapon, that fact probably was making the Church salivate with greed. There was no way they really felt all that much for helping out some poor peasant girl, altruism was not their style despite the image they staunchly tried to portray to their parishioners.

“We are concerned for the girl,” Aela angrily insisted. “Like you cared for her wellbeing at all while she was in your clutches. I’m sure your only thoughts were how to taint and manipulate her to supplicate the denoms you bedded with. Please stop fooling yourself into believing that you could have possibly been an effective caretaker, there is not a matronly or loving bone in your body. Neither of those are passed down in our family.”

A timid knock on the door interrupted what the twin was saying anymore and she swung around to pull the door open, revealing a teenage girl carrying two buckets, one filled with soapy water and the other filled with already slightly filthy rags. Aela said nothing more and instead pointed towards the sick on the floor next to my bed and roughly brushed past the girl, nearly knocking her over as she left. The girl looked down the hallway with fear, clutching the sloshing bucket tight to her abdomen as if spilling a drop might provoke Aela into turning back and exploding on her with the full extent of her wrath. At least the people around her were not blind to her true disposition, I had always wondered if she had been able to hide her nasty personality and don the mantle of a pious, kind woman. I supposed that was too big of an ask for someone like her.

“I’m sorry,” the girl whispered, though not to me, nor would it make sense to have been for Aela’s ears either as she was well away already brooding in her own angry thoughts.

With a glance and a nervous smile, the girl entered the room and set the buckets on the floor so that she could carefully and gently close the door behind her without making a sound. Her shoulders visibly relaxed as she did and she let out a puff of a held breath before picking up the buckets again and turning towards the mess.

“Oh,” she said softly, seemingly startled that she forgot about me and let her guard down, “I’m sorry to disturb you, miss. I won’t be long to clean up, then I will leave you be.”

Finding the strength to get my hands planted firmly on the bed, I was able to wriggle myself back up into a seated position against the wall and nodded, then waved my hand to signal her to continue with what she was doing.

“Oh my, you’re not feeling very well, are you?” Her placid green eyes widened with concern and she took a step forward to try to assess if there was any way she could help me.

“Not very, no,” I managed to croak out.

“Would you like me to get you something to eat? You look a bit peckish.”

“Yes, food would probably help.” My eyes glanced over the mess on the floor and my stomach churned. “Perhaps after you clean that up and make it something bland.”

She emphatically nodded her head and hopped to her task quickly, wiping up and scrubbing the area of the floor as if having her hands in my vomit didn’t bother her one bit. The way she went about it even seemed like she was practiced, like it was a task she had learned over time how to complete quickly and effectively. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know exactly what the Church was doing so frequently that made their people desensitized to shoving their hands in biological messes. The sight did nothing for the churning in my stomach.

“I will be right back, miss,” she said after she had cleaned up everything and placed the soiled rags back in the bucket. “Would you like me to help you lay back down?”

I almost opened my mouth to agree, but then I remembered what her hands had just been doing. “No, I think I will still sit up and wait to finish eating before I lay back down.”

“Of course, I will be right back with a soft meal and then help you get back to bed.”

Her smile was truly kind, which was not something I would expect from this kind of place. It made me feel a bit uneasy, like she would turn out to be just another snake in the grass, but I could not deny that I needed assistance, so I merely agreed to wait for her return. With her gone from the room, the weight of the knowledge of where I was began to seep into my pores. I was in the very depths of enemy territory, in the clutches of the people who rather see me tortured and maimed.