Miscreated

When it is your time to be born, your soul is plucked from the sea and set into the new body. Perhaps your soul is picked for a reason beyond your conceiving, perhaps it is merely the first orb that the hand finds. The truth is that it doesn't matter, nor is it your place to know. All that matters is that it is you, it is here, and it is now.

But you aren't... born. Not exactly.

The foul hand that plucks you from the peaceful sea settles you into a bizarre body. It lies on a slab, made up of cold dead skin instead of the new body you would hope. You struggle against the magical current pulling you down into the necrotic blob on the table, but the hand wins.

Your world goes black as you settle unwillingly into your new host. Immediately, all of your previous knowledge and memories turn to mush. Just to be replaced with the constant low buzz of the sense that something is incorrect. Something is deeply wrong with what is happening to you.

The sense comes into your new limbs slowly, and before long you can even open your eyes. The new body resists you, but not indefinitely.

"Can you hear me, Thrall?" A woman's voice asks you.

You turn your head slowly to find the person asking, you find a shadowy figure sitting slumped in the corner.

"Good." She sighs, an incredible weariness paints her voice with a rasping fry. "Then the process is working."

You manage to pull yourself up to a seated position. The woman rises from her seat, seemingly exhausted. You move your body slowly, in parts. Feeling out what you are capable of and what you aren't. Even when you see your limbs moving, it's hard to think in a straight line and recognize it as happening. Your brain is occupied by a consistent red mist. When the woman speaks, she cuts through it.

"Come, my thrall, we have work to do."

You rise fully from the slab, feeling your feet hit the cold floor. You take slow, shuffling steps after the woman. As you do, there comes a clattering sound from your neck. Around your neck is a golden ring, decorated all around with red letters and runes. You can't read them. When you reach up your hand to pull at the ring, the mist gets stronger. The woman seems to notice this.

"Does the weight bother you, thrall?"

You don't respond in any legible way, merely grunting back at her. She stops and steps back toward you, looking up into your eyes.

"Do you remember your voice, thrall?"

Again a grunt.

"If I have performed my duty correctly, you should be little more than an animal. I ask again, do you recall your voice?"

You open your mouth, trying to respond. You manage a "nuhhhh, nuhhhhh."

She smiles. "The memory is retained, though buried." She pushes her cold palm into your chest. You reach out to grab her arm a full couple of seconds too late to stop her, by which time you're already on the ground on your back like an overturned turtle.

She stands over you., "Forget who you were, if you remember it. That person no longer exists. I created you to do a job."

You manage to flail yourself back to your feet. You reach out a hand to touch the woman's floor-length hair. She doesn't stop you, watching with dismissive interest. You reach back over to your head, there's hair there too, but not like hers. Hers is long, straight, and black. Yours is shorter, curly, and red. Her skin is a muddy brown, yours is deathly bloodless pale. Her ears are long and pointed, yours short and round. There's a deeply buried term your brain tries to create to describe her, trying to come up with it makes the mist come back.

"Is your brain fully numb or does it think of me? What is it that it calls me?"

"Aaaa. Aaaa."

She looks disappointed. "I've done a truly fantastic job. For that, I am sorry."

You spend a long time following the woman. It's hard to say how long. She spends most days and nights either reading books and scrolls in her library or conjuring cascading lights in her main chamber. During both, you feel her magic coursing through you. You are a conduit for her, a capacitor her energy passes through. At the rare times that she sleeps, you stand over her bed, watching her. Her sleep is fitful, her dreams seem to torment her. When she wakes, it is often in a panic. At these times, she reaches out and grasps your hand as she attempts to calm herself.

Sometimes, a traveler will come to your home. Some come to her for aid, some for advice. Most barge in, ready to maim or slay her. All those that do are stricken down in different ways. She seems to enjoy these visitors, she seems to always be searching for a way to slay them that makes them linger in suffering the longest. She turns some into animals, she keeps them in jars.

From the day you were brought into her world, she has been building to something. She rebirths several others like you, several other conduits with golden neck rings. She treats you the nicest of them. You are her pride. Maybe because you were the first, maybe for some other reason. The others do not stand over her bed, the others do not provide relief from her dreams.

There are four of you when she says the time has come for the ritual. She has the four of you stand around her in a circle, with her as the center. For days you stand this way, bodies frozen in place. A whirlwind of magic that seems to rip the very fabric of the room around you apart. All the time, she is at the center. She does not waver, not even as it seems the skin rends from her bones. The conduits begin to shake, their vibrations only quieting as their souls begin to slide from their bodies. You are all taken up into the whirling vortex around her. You can feel yourself being scraped thin, taken into the vortex.

Beneath all of this, your old body takes a step forward, reaching out for the woman.

She manages a disbelieving "How?" before the room cracks open and your vision goes white.

You feel your soul coming drifting back down into your body, now partly buried under stone. You manage to pull yourself up and out of it. You are covered in small, superficial wounds but otherwise unharmed. The other conduits were not so lucky, they're all buried, broken beyond repair. The woman lies where she fell in the center, it's hard to say how she is.

Your golden neck ring falls broken to the ground. You reach up to feel its absence in confusion. You realize in the process that you move more freely than before. For the first time, the red mist is gone. Your head is pounding too hard to feel any good about it. You simultaneously experience two different first thoughts.

"I hope she's okay."

"Run."

The second one wins out, but you have nowhere you can run to. The entryway has been blocked by collapsed ceiling. You do remember another passway, one at the back of the ancient fireplace. It leads out through the sewers. You make your way over, recalling what the fleeing adventurer had done in the night to get out of paying the woman. You had watched blank-eyed, letting them go.

The old passway opens, you clamber inside, still clumsy with your newfound movements. The doorway doesn't close entirely behind you. As you travel down the tunnel, you hear commotion from the other room.

"Thrall? Thrall?!"

The woman calls behind you, with each repetition she gets more .

"I should go back."

"If you go back, you'll never get another chance."

You keep going, hearing the woman's calls grow quiet and then silent. After some time, the tunnel dumps you out into a quiet lakeside. Around the lake are an impenetrable wall of trees, inky black in the night.

You want to make plans, you want to get further away. However, your legs give out. You pass out to the sounds of animals, sounds you've heard before... you think.