The Starry Maiden

Seized

Waking up is slow.

Slower than I've woken up in a long time...

Images flash through my mind, are they from a dream?

An insidious grin on the face of Zachariah Moore.

Nyx... My sister... She was holding something... A syringe.

The world falling away from me.

I fly up from the bed, surprising the person in the room with me.

Nyx.

Immediately a wave of dizziness washes over me and I tip sideways.

"I was starting to wonder when you were going to wake up..." Nyx says as helps me settle on the bed with my back against the wall behind me.

The room is plain, with cement walls and small windows along the top of the wall opposite the bed. Too slim for anyone to get through and too high to reach and look out. The door is metal with a small window. And at the opposite end of the room from the door is a washroom, separated from this space by only a wall of windows.

This is a cell.

A prison.

"What happened? Where am I?" I ask her, knowing I won't get solid answers.

"Don't worry. You're safe here. We can protect you from them." She says confidently, "It's okay if you don't remember everything... They did horrible things to you." What is she talking about? Are they trying to manipulate me? The drugs definitely affected my memory for sure... I barely remember the café from before we went in to get Yusuf and nearly everything afterwards is hazy at best. But I can remember sending Aquilo and Zephyr away with Yusuf... And... Nyx betrayed me. Mesonyx, my older sister...

She betrayed me.

To the Templars no less.

And the fact that she is talking to me like I should have forgotten at least the last month or so since the attack on my condo. This tells me that they don't know I'm different. That they don't know that I'm not quite human. That their drugs haven't quite had the effect they were looking for. And most importantly they don't know that I'm the source of power that has extended Yusuf's existence.

And I must do everything I can to make sure they don't find out. The Templars absolutely can not know. This means that I must work on more mundane ways of escaping this. I can't blast my way out of this cell through the wall and fly away on glowing wings.

"Protect me? From who? Where are Aquilo and Zephyr?" I decide to act as though the drugs did exactly what they had intended. She sighs and reaches for my cheek; I flinch away from it. If I'm going to play along, I'm going all the way. Maybe if this goes well, I can get them to let their guard down...

"Sorry... But Raea... They..." She's acting, I can see it in her gestures and hear it in her tone, "They hurt you. Badly. They took you to the Assassins and they tortured you for information on our uncle, only because he approached you at that café." So they're trying to spin themselves as my saviours. Not a bad plan; if their drugs had been used on the old me, this would have gone off without a hitch, "We tried to save you... But we were too late. It took us a couple of weeks to even find where they took you. You've been asleep for a few days since we brought you here."

"I... I don't remember any of that... I don't remember being tortured at all. Lio and Zeph wouldn't do that to me... And Dad... He wouldn't have let it happen." I have to remember what I was like before. I have to remember and use it. I am not the millennia-old ruthless Astraea. I am the naïve, lost, lonely Astraea who didn't belong anywhere.