The torment of the North Court raged on relentlessly, stretching to weeks and at last to months. Sora's universe narrowed to the sour realities of screeching muscles, crunch of pebbles against abraded flesh, the metal edge of fright and blood in his mouth, and the ever-present watching eyes of Rykor and Kenji. His flesh was being brutally reshaped by the ceaseless, brutal training. Child flesh was trimmed away to be replaced with whipcord muscle developed not from healthy exercise, but from painful effort forced beyond the limits of the ordinary. Scars spread – the badly mended ribs flared in pain with some motion, the dislocated finger was twisted at the joint, a jagged white scar ran down his forearm where the blunt training dagger had torn the flesh. He was being taught the brutal math of existing in the Castle of Shadows.
The sparring sessions were still a sort of hell. He was still at the mercy of Kenji's raw strength and Rykor's tightly wound speed, and raw, unadulterated pain was teaching him nasty lessons. He was instinctually learning to drop his chin, defend his center of balance, roll with a fall, and take some of the blow with him. His own actions were getting less wild and evasively more so – little desperate evasions to get out of the way of a blow, swift parries out of habit rather than method. He was still ending most sessions battered and cut up and half-hanging from the floor parrying, but was getting used to getting through it in a way that terrified him to his bones. Pain was becoming second nature and almost routine.
It was sometime during this period of four or five months of brutal adiestramiento, that there arose a more insidious and dangerous foe that infiltrated the barren landscape of his mind: the seductive whisper of oblivion.
It was the result of a particularly brutal session with Kenji. Sora had erred – hesitated by the space of a split second during a block practice – and the response had come instantly and ruthlessly. An effective blow to the head sent him reeling and stumbling, a painful kick sent him flying, his wrist twisting under his body in the wrong way and sending him landing on the mat with a crunch of bone and gristle. For an instant of blinding white-hot pain nothing else was felt. His left wrist was broken. Horribly. Bone was visible beneath the skin a few inches, the angle macabre.
Nausea welled up, dense and bitter. He was on the ground clutching his shattered wrist to his chest, tears of sheer physical shock and pain running down his face and mingling with dirt and sweat. Kenji looked down at him with an utterly expressionless face.
"Careless," the guard stated bluntly. "Protect your centerline at all times. Anticipate at all times. You exposed yourself." He prodded Sora's broken arm with the tip of his boot and sent Sora wracked with another wave of nausea and a stifled gasp. "Clean break," he stated callously. "It'll heal. Eventually."
"Get him to the infirmary block," Kenji called to Rykor, who waited in the wings. "Have Hemlock set it firmly and tightly. He is to train again tomorrow. Legwork only."
The infirmary block was a euphemism for dingy dark chambers near the lowest dungeons where grave injuries that couldn't be ignored were roughly dressed by prune-like and sour-mouthed old Hemlock, who smelled of stale herbs and rubbing alcohol constantly. Hemlock roughly set the bone in place with callous disrespect to Sora's strangling gasps, applied some putrid-smelling ointment, and bound up the wrist tightly with stiff wooden splints and grubby strips of linen. Pain scorched and was unending.
Ottmar was put back in his cell in the training wing (contact with the other trainees was discouraged and kept to a minimum). Pain coursed with sadistic ferocity. There was to be no sleep. Even the least movement jolted fire through his arm. He shook in the dark and heard the plashing of water, the muffled shouts of the guards, the occasional moan from some other tormented shape down the way away from his own. And the thought intruded, unwanted, slithering uninvited into his mind like a snake. So easy to simply stop. Stop resisting. Stop getting up. Stop existing. What was the purpose? To be like Kenji? Like Rykor? Scornful empty husks with nothing in them but apathy? To perhaps soon enough acquire the black tattoo that did seem to mean these abominations? He had discovered none yet, none of his own to share a glimmer of hope with, but only the emptiness for which lay ahead of him. Escape from suffering was the thought alone. Release. He did not need to eat the meager rations, lie still and allow the infection that was undoubtedly fermenting in his wrist to run its course. It would cease. Suffering would cease. Fear would cease. Endless suffocating despair would cease. Nothingness was a cold dark promise.
He closed his eyes and focused on the burn on his wrist, almost embracing it as the last hold to stop from relinquishing it. He visualized himself fading away into nothingness and becoming cold and stiff like the stone beneath him.
A sudden and violent kick against his cell door filled him with sickening realization again. He flinched violently, cradling his injured arm.
"Don't even think about it, boy." Kenji's voice cut through the solid wood, low and grating and perilously close. Had he listened? Spied through the peephole? Sora felt another jolt of cold fear at the thought.
"Saw that look in your eyes today," Kenji continued in that inflectionless voice of his that was so unmistakably menacing. "The look of surrender. Of taking the easy way out. Let me tell you something about the easy way out here." He was silent in the darkness for a moment. "Death is not what is in store in Kurogane. By any stretch of the imagination. There is what the Lady does to the failures, to those who completely fail. What is done in that training area is a Sunday afternoon stroll compared to them. There is the end of the completely useless which makes oblivion feel like a warm hug. Do you hear me?"
He didn't react, couldn't react. He was shaking that much.
"You will survive," Kenji stated firmly, not in a comforting tone, but in a commanding one. "You will survive what is happening here. You will eat what is put before you. You will train tomorrow, even in the legs. Because what Vayne is offering in the way of utter failure is something you cannot imagine. You will not give up, and neither will I."
The clumping of Kenji's boots died away down the hall and Sora was alone in the thick gloom, the memory of what had come before tainted by a new and greater fear. He had not believed there was anything worse than that. Kenji's stern, absolute words called up dark and indistinct though unthinkable images in his mind – dark rituals, endless torment, something worse than being a training dummy. The transient, desperate wish to die was brutally murdered, replaced by a fierce, animalistic determination to just go on existing, come what may. He looked at his throbbing, splinted wrist not with a sense of crushing burden, but with a symbol of life, wretched though it was. He would eat the tasteless gruel that was fed to him. He would force his shrieking legs through tomorrow's exercises. He would survive the agony, the fright, the degradation. Not with hope, not with bravery, but with the cold, gruesome certainty that in this hole in the ground, lower underground places of torture lay in store for those who yielded to weakness. The provocation had been overcome, not by inner resilience of will, but by the cold danger of something worse waiting just outside his current torture. His determination to go on stayed with him, not in the form of a spark of life, but in the desperate impulse of a trapped rat to escape another and even deadlier predator than his current one.