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Pain yanked you in fits and starts out of unconsciousness. Everything ached, muscles burning, but nothing so much as your face. Pulses of agony radiated out from your jaw and into your skull, pounding against your temples and behind your eyes less with the relentless stuttering of a jackhammer and more with the slow, more powerful swing of a sledgehammer.
Nausea pushed at the base of your throat, edging closer in the wake of each sickening thud in your skull.
You tried to curl in on yourself, desperate for relief from the pain, but something held you back, fixing you in place. Reaching to dislodge it, you found your arms trapped, too, then your legs.
Your eyes peeled open. Warm light cast deep shadows in a room otherwise cold and unfeeling, a tomb of marble leeching your own warmth away. Pedestals rose out in even intervals around you like the stumps of felled, petrified wood. In glass cases or exposed to the air, artifacts sat displayed atop them, the lighting overhead perfectly illuminating each in their own cones of light.
At the center of this room, directly across from a group of men strewn about a blonde-haired statue, you sat strapped to a heavy chair. Heavy braided rope bound you to its back, arms, and legs, more effective than duct tape. You didn't give the men the satisfaction of pulling on the ropes.
It was always going to end this way, wasn't it? you thought, fingers curling tight into fists, the ropes digging into your wrists. There was no escaping consequences, parasitic god or not.
Lifting your attention away from the ropes, you scanned the faces of the men in the room. None looked familiar but for the blonde-haired statue-and the man slumped against his feet, features slack.
Fear crested on the waves of pain. Blood matted Steven's curls at the nape of his neck, a bruise blossoming dark on Marc's temple. Seeing them unconscious and beaten instilled more dread in you than being tied to a chair in a room full of strange men.
