Intoxicated

Prologue

I never understood the phrase 'blood runs cold'. It's absurd. If someone is so terrified of dying, the last thing they should want is to die blue-blooded.

But my fingers are shaking, and my wrists ache. They ache so much. I can feel the skin on my hands writhing, burning against the rope tied around them. And my arms – oh my arms! Every single hair on my arm is standing as they helplessly twist behind a pillar. Twisting this way and that, bruises forming each time they move into another deformed shape. The pillar: it's as if glass and stone has been carved in to the jagged rock, and each piece of glass, each fragment of stone, is digging into my back, making it so that every time I breathe, a hoarse scream leaves the back of my throat and claws its way to my eardrums - as if my ears aren't ringing anyway. My legs feel as if they've been bent backwards, and my heart skips a beat every time I feel a trickle of blood fall from my knee. I can't see it, but I can feel the gash.

I can't see anything. There's a black cloth tightened around my eyes - or at least I think it's black. Its fabric is pressed against the side of my face, and it's itching. I keep trying - and failing - to rub it against my shoulder, but I can't reach it no matter how many times I move my neck. My neck itself has become so stiff that moving it is like removing a thorn from a finger: agonizingly slow and unbearably excruciating.

I can't see anything. But I can feel pure dread drip in the sweat building on my forehead and I can only begin to describe the horrifying pain throbbing through my veins as if my raw skin is being peeled off, bit by painful bit.

But the worst of this, the worst of all this torture is my blood running cold - each drop sending me shivers as I shake in pure terror, counting the seconds before I pass out again.