Elissa’s life became an endless blur of painful sex and endless dry lecturing after her request to learn the ways of blood. Many days, from the moment she woke, Dark was bending her, twisting her, and using her in some odd and extremely painful ritual of lust; all while dryly rambling on about feeling her ‘pools of power’, ‘circulating her blood’, or ‘opening her essence’.

Battered and used beyond the points of her own comprehension, days and weeks passed for Elissa as she was lost in an endless haze of pain and lust. Dark deliberately pushed her into positions that dislocated joints over and over in his endless orgy of lust, and then forcefully pushed her bones back in place. No joint in her body seemed safe from the dispassionate pain he inflicted on her as he systematically dislocated her fingers, shoulders, hips, legs, and her all other joints while incessantly riding her first in one obscure position and then another.

After a while, Elissa began to feel less and less like a human and more and more as nothing more than a rubber doll built simply for Dark’s amusement. Hours blurred together endlessly with her body wracked with pain and covered in a rainbow of bruises and her mind shut down and drifted into peaceful oblivion while she was awake.

How many days or weeks had passed in her endless blur, Elissa had no way of knowing. She could’ve been a prisoner of Dark’s ritual of lust for months, or even years, and she wouldn’t know. All she knew was she endured an endless eternity of torment, a plaything for The Darkness, and then one day it suddenly stopped.

One moment her mind was lost in a daze as her body was pushed, broken, and violated. The next, she groggily realized that she was sprawled out in some unspeakable position on her back, with her head resting impossibly on her ankles.

For a long time; she didn’t know how long as time no longer seemed to have any meaning to her; she laid there and tried to comprehend the change. Dark’s incessant ravaging of her body had finally stopped and he had returned to sitting in his chair and rocking contentedly as he stared down at her twisted and seed-covered form.

At first, her body refused to obey her commands. Disjointed, wracked with pain and covered in a myriad assortment of new and old bruises, Elissa couldn’t even make her own fingers twitch. A panic of being paralyzed and trapped in her own body – nothing more than a true doll – filled her being. For days she struggled with tears leaking down the corner of her eyes, until she could twitch her fingers again.

As if the first sign of movement from her was a sign he was waiting for, Dark instantly stared up his lecturing once again. “In all things, existence seeks to find balance,” he told her, his voice as dry and unnaturally unemotional as ever. “Water flows from the highest to the lowest. Fire exists only where there is fuel to feed upon. There can be no light without darkness, no life without death. There is a balance for all things. A yin for each yang, an ending to every beginning. All things in existence have a balance.”

“All things save one,” he warned her sternly as she struggled to wiggle her toes and force her legs back into their proper human position. “I broke the rules of nature. The laws of creation. There has never been any balance to my existence. I alone simply am.”

“Or, I was,” Dark chuckled cryptically. “I have only planted the seed within you. Your body has been filled, covered, and infused with my ‘blood of life’ – some of my most powerful essence. My energy has infused you and your essence must either grow to equal it, or else be burned and destroyed by it. If your yin can not grow to balance my yang inside you, then you are doomed.”

“If you do manage to grow and find an inner balance, even I have no idea what you may become,” Dark warned her. “Will you grow to become my equal? Once you begin the road of blood, will you eventually surpass me? Will I finally be allowed the release from existence I desire?”

“Much as a parent does not know the destiny of their child, nor how great they can soar, I do not know the answers to these questions. I have planted the seed of possibility into you,” Dark chuckled, seemingly amused by his own words, “and it is up to you to determine what it blossoms into.”

Still struggling to force her body to respond and unpretzel itself, Elissa could say nothing. Weaker than a newborn, she was slowly coming to realize that she had experienced some twisted ritual of breaking and remaking. An endless nagging worry began to take root in the back of her mind. If she was being remade, what was she being remade into?

She didn’t know, and from Dark’s words, it didn’t sound as if he knew either. Was she even human anymore? Would she keep her humanity? Or would she eventually become more like The Darkness?

Not knowing was a fear that eat at the corner of her mind and which pushed her to struggle even harder to try and bend herself back into proper shape. She had to hold on to what she was – what she’d always been – so she didn’t lose the most important parts of herself as she slowly became whatever she was transforming to be.