Azotreh awoke in a dark room, as she did every morning. The eighth and third hour of the night, just before the sun rose. The dim cerulean lighting of the facility greeted them, brightening as their eyes opened.
Honeyed silver light from the dawnlight moon and the twin stripes filtered between the bars on the window of their cell. The orange gold of the sky met the harsh blue of the light array set into the iron floor, creating a clashing dance of color across it.
A desolate chill filtered in through the window, once again just a little warmer than the day before. The planting season was approaching, breaking the wintry chill with soft rains and melting snow.
Their skin was chilled as the world beyond, though their breath didn't mist the air. A night terror, like many they'd experienced before. Yet this one came not with heat and the crackling of flame, but instead with familiar yet fundamentally different sensations. Heavy rain, suppressed by a hooded stick. Overbearing sound, followed by a bright, piercing light. Then a sudden impact and silence.
The sensation was so real that her hands instinctively reached for her stomach to feel its smooth skin. She expected the force to have crushed each one of their ribs and shattered her spine. Yet none of that was the case. Besides the aching marks imposed on her neck, she was whole.
Her aura once more tried to push against the thin line of brands left along the base of her throat. Most others received a thick iron collar, but she'd had the marks directly seared into her skin. The administrator had called it necessary, called her more valuable than the others. She didn't feel valuable.
Her left hand reached up and covered the left side of their face. The fresh scar tissue around her eye still failed to fully heal, even with the assistance of arcane healing. The scar tissue wasn't sensitive; instead, she held her hand there to hide the eye that was not her own. The dark iris and slitted pupil that glared back every time she looked in a mirror.
Her heart still raced in her chest, but began to slow after a mere moment. It was only a nightmare, after all. They had experienced many similar nightmares before, and knew that such things couldn't hurt her anymore. If they could, they would have years ago.
She pressed her right hand to the nearest wall, a blue screen lighting up within the deep black metallic surface of her cell. The eye not covered by their hand read the information on the screen. Experiments for today were cancelled. Likely not entirely, but today was her birthday.
Five years in this gods-awful place. At least now, if she did eventually manage to escape and somehow remove the brands, they would gain access to the system.
Today marked her eighth year of life. Her parents had named her earlier than most, and she was still glad for it. The administrator was terrible at naming, even if he was forced to do so for the sake of the system.
An alert flashed over the screen beside her bed, supposedly identical to the notifications of the system itself. It was a simple notification of awakening, the same that greeted her each day when she opened her eyes. The administrator had likely been notified of her awakening the moment the screen flickered to life. Azotreh didn't much care anymore. She'd been surveilled almost constantly for every moment of her life they could remember. It wasn't as if she could have anything to hide.
Incapable of returning to sleep for one more second, Azotreh instead returned her eyes to the screen to wait until the first and first hour. She would likely be disturbed once again once the sun's beams penetrated their dim cell.
Azotreh selected one of the tabs atop the screen, also supposedly identical in basic form to the tabs of the system interface. Normally, Azotreh would gain its influence today once the sun reached its zenith during the fourth and first hour. She thought something might interfere with her induction, specifically the brands burned into her throat.
She checked the tab showing their vitals. Besides a lessening elevated heart rate and the persistent signs of sleep deprivation, her vitals were normal. How the screen managed to detect what was happening even within Azotreh's body, she didn't know, and had no reason to ask.
She pressed her fingers to the screen a few more times, checking over allotted food and any experiments for the week. The one they dreaded most occurred this Umelsday, just two days from today.
Azotreh was given the designation AZ-087, a codename prominently branded into the center of the imprinted collar. No other AZ-designated experiment had returned from the upcoming experiment. Azotreh had apparently shown 'promising results,' but it didn't lighten their mood. Even the most promising candidate would probably die in the same way as all the others.
She put that gruesome thought out of her mind. Today was her birthday; she should at least try to be happy. Or as close to happy as there was to be in this place.
The hours ticked by slowly until the fourth hour of the day. The sun was approaching its zenith beyond the caged window.
No guards had come by to do anything more than check that Azotreh was still present within her cell. Birthdays were commonly called break days by their fellow experiments for a reason. No one would bother her for the sake of experimentation, and food would be brought to her cell. No trips to the cafeteria were necessary.
Her time wasn't spent idle. If there was one thing Azotreh despised, it was boredom. She had experienced plenty of it early in their time at the facility. But as she'd aged, she'd also proven herself worth the bare necessities. She had proven to the administrator that she was a valuable subject, and had been given some additional things to pass the time.
While it didn't feel as rewarding as many of the older experiments described true skill advancement to be, she still spent time practicing their skills in Scinparic. The language was fundamental to human society, and they had been promised integration once the war was over.
She had also spent time with allotted basic materials learning to read, write, and draw as she did now. Azotreh opened one of the few books she'd been given, one on monsters. She opened to another page describing some horrific amalgamation of animal bits. A spider with three tails like that of a scorpion, twin canine heads, and a third head mounted on its back belonging to a seahorse. Despite their rather silly appearance, they were known to be threats, especially if they reached the miniboss or boss-category.
But the book had more than a picture of the monster, having descriptive text in Scinparic and notes in Scinarchtic. She wasn't as practiced in the language of the magi, but could read it well enough.
Using the notes in the book to recount her letters and numbers, Azotreh copied the monster sheet onto a piece of her own paper using a sharpened piece of mana quartz. The process required precision and a steady hand, but she'd gotten the hang of it rather quickly. She had gotten some genuine praise from the administrator after revealing her progress, and had started copying the notes held by the administrator to both improve her skills and to restore the odd man's library.
But today, the writing and drawing were mostly done to spend her time until the sun reached its peak beyond the cell's window.
Once the first zenith had been reached, the carved collar around her neck exploded into light, the same shade of cerulean blue as the light of the walls.
Pain unlike any she had ever experienced coursed through her body. It pulsed and raged from their heart, trying to move through the brands and reach their head, but unable to pass. One of the runic brands lit up far brighter than the rest. Energy crackled from the collar, lighting the room with a far greater ferocity than the cool lighting of the circle etched into the floor.
A rainbow of colors began to shine from within Azotreh as she stumbled into her private bathroom. The tiled room was another gift from the administrator for good work. Barely better than the essentials, but it was hers and mostly private, making it better than the accommodations for the other experiments.
A rune on the floor lit up as they moved to the shower. The lights still flickered in their cell as they moved, stripping their flat gray clothes before turning on the water. The brands on her throat flared even more brightly as something slowly attempted to solidify in the air before Azotreh.
A polyhedron the size of her head with an ever-shifting number of sides flickered into existence before them. Made from pure oceanic light, the polyhedron didn't seem real, though it became more so with each passing second.
The ephemeral hedron rose higher and sank into her forehead, sending new jolts of pain through her body. Every muscle in her body tensed at once, sending Azotreh convulsing to the black marble-like base of the tub. Her skin lit up from beneath with a bright blue light for just an instant before everything went dark.
Her draconic eye flared with power from below the collar, her mind only feeling the sensation as it passed the brands, and illuminated the room in dim colors despite the total darkness. While some sunlight filtered in through the window in the primary part of the cell, the bathroom had no such amenities. Only the Eye of the Black Dragon allowed Azotreh to see through the pitch-black.
It took a minute for the facility's lighting to reactivate, and a pair of guards entered the cell to find Azotreh in the tub. They glanced at each other, shrugged, and left the cell. So long as the experiment had neither attempted escape nor shown signs of planning an attempt, they had no business interfering with the administrator's projects.
Azotreh blocked out the sudden ache in her throat and the slight pain in her joints as something manifested in the air before her. A small blue square of the same cerulean light as the lights of the facility. It did truly look like the screen on her wall, though less solid and fraying at the edges. It didn't project anything, didn't even illuminate her face, but still sat in the empty air.
The screen further frayed at the edges with each passing second, seeming to visibly unravel in strings of characters Azotreh didn't recognize. Yet at the center, the box read,
[Welcome to The System]
But it didn't just read it in Scinparic. Below the box was another set of characters Azotreh did not remember learning, and yet understood. The same phrase was written in the foreign tongue, and as Azotreh read it again and again, it was as if a voice of a close friend she'd never known translated them for her.
Azotreh stared blankly at the other language until the box fizzled out, soon replaced by a second one.
[System access limited by site wards and the Brands of Administration. Leave the area and remove the collar to gain full access.]
The second box swiftly fizzled out into characters Azotreh didn't recognize, leaving Azotreh alone. Curled in the bottom of a black stone bathtub, with renewed aches and pains like those she'd awoken with. Yet, she was filled with a newfound hope. It had worked, even if it wasn't what she'd expected of being blessed by the system; it was still a possible light of hope. Maybe there would be an escape from this wretched place someday.
She turned off the water and stepped from the tub. A runic circle on the floor ignited with orange and gray power and released a blast of heated wind to dry her. Only as the air and heat kicked up did they notice one other change they did not expect. Some of her hair had turned white.
Azotreh was pale due to a lack of sunlight, with long dark hair, well kept since brushing her hair was a soothing ritual after days of stress and exhaustion. She had a thin build, though visibly with a little more muscle mass than most experiments due to the marginally better food Azotreh received. But all of that had changed. Her skin had somehow grown a single tone paler in an instant. She had grown by a few centimeters, and some of her hair had turned from an abyssal black to a platinum white. Not all of it, but more than enough to be noticeable. Her hair looked like a mix of salt and ground pepper.
Rather than continue to just observe herself with her eyes alone as the air dried their body, she moved to the mirror set into the wall. The pane of glass and silver was usually a painful reminder to them, with the scar and alien eye always staring back. But this time, there wasn't just one alien eye looking back at them, but a pair.
The black eye, deep as the elemental plane of darkness, was still as ever, though orbited by a small round green spot. The spot did nothing but spin around the draconic pupil, yet still disturbed Azotreh to the core. Worse, the same thing had happened to her original eye, the one she retained. Her formerly purple-tinted blue eye was now also orbited by an identical emerald point.
She experimentally reached up and poked herself in the eye, hissing in pain as she did. But when she recovered and looked back in the mirror, the spot was still there. It wasn't an illusion of the blue facility lights, nor of the golden sun now beginning its descent through the sky.
She had no explanation, nor even where to begin asking about the strange phenomenon with her eyes. Whatever this was, it was not something she could easily explain to the administrator when they went in for AZ-02 in just two days.
Just as she finished that thought, a headache overtook her. She had left on Eye of the Black Dragon even after the light returned to life, draining her vibrancy down to its lowest possible quantity. The eye deactivated, and the few dark corners of the room darkened once more, no longer lit by the power of her eye.
She clutched their head in one hand as she put on some pants and returned to her central cell area. She'd finish the page tomorrow. For now, she needed sleep. Her body ached worse than ever as the overdrained vibrancy had begun to pull on her vigor as well. It left her weakened, something that could only be fixed with an extended night's sleep.
As Azotreh climbed back into the stiff bed, she felt her stressed body relax. No matter how hard the bed was, being asleep was usually better than being awake. It didn't take her long after her eyes closed for her to enter the land of dreams.