09:51 / 24:37, Rotation 518 / 687, 231 AE, 8.889024, 137.116927, Aryss

  At the central nexus that the holding block deposited her to, Vilithe jumped into the warm sticky fluid of a body delivery tube, this one going downwards instead of up. She shot feet first down through a glass tube filled with fast flowing oxygenated mucus - it percolated with the flow as small bubbles and allowed normal breathing - she felt herself lifted upside down and now traveling upwards, it spat her back into one of the main hive lobby tube reception pools.

  Chamber 4EFF47, where was that? There was no presence of Amefrid’s mind within her own. The Princess had gotten bored of her game piece, as usual. She had no guidance but was expected to finish what she was commanded to do.

  Malevolent.

  Malevolent, unmuted again, immediately began to taunt Vilithe.

  Oh, lost now are we, foolish vassal? Can’t find your way around the hive? Incompetent!

  Shut up, Malevolent!

  You unmuted me, vassal! Hahaha! Why don’t you shut up? It made no sense. How could one silence one’s own mind?

  But now Malevolent began to scry her for what she had done to Kwandriss.

  Applaudable, vassal! Going above and beyond the call of duty.

  Somehow, Malevolent’s praise just made Vilithe feel nothing but disgust at herself. But what else could she do, to protect Kwandriss’ mind from further fraying?

  Just show me where to go.

  A spirit, no matter how rambunctious, was still beholden to the elvans, regardless of rank and status. And so Malevolent dutifully lit up the way. A pink hallucinogenic trail of fey light emerged from her chest, guiding her. She quickly muted the nasty little spirit again once she got the information that she needed.

  She wiped off some mucus from her body, and plod along to chamber 4EFF47, which was just behind the back hallway of the seventh exit from the eighth turn of the central roundabout on the north corner of the west wing.

  It took her an hour of walking through the hive to where she had to go next. All throughout was simple silent shuffling of masses upon masses of mute elvan bodies, almost all communication conducted psionically. It made her numb.

  Now she was in a dingy abandoned mine, repurposed as a general holding area for frayed minds. The rocky, unevenly hewn walls felt encompassing and suffocating, even though in all respects the tunnels were quite wide and tall. It was just the unevenness of it, a result of the spirits seeking to carve through the softest rock as to create the most efficient path to accrue minerals, that made Vilithe feel claustrophobic.

  In a little dead-end branch of the mine sat a crouched and shivering old soldier, at least, old for soldiers. His hair had all fallen out, so had his teeth.

  “Ah, Ahh… AH!”

  His pitiful moaning was warped by the loss of his teeth. He was swinging hooks and jabs at invisible ghosts, shadow boxing. Naked just like most elvans are in the hive, his legs trembled with every rotating counter step, his blows always seemed to unbalance him, leaving him wide open for a riposte. His amygdala, though she could not see it visually, felt gross and bloated.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “Ee-yagh!” he was scowling with a menace now, either an attempt to intimidate, or perhaps he had gotten the better of whatever imaginary demon he was fighting in his mind.

  He was suffering from aggravated post-traumatic stress disorder. That, and an accumulation of aggravated injuries. His major bones had been broken and reset so many times that they were all crooked. Ulcers lined his stomach, he couldn’t even absorb nutrition properly, and his spirits were failing, rebelling against him, demanding to be let out of his body. Untended vertebrae fractures all along his spine meant that he was constantly in agonizing pain, which the spirits had attempted to nullify by elevating his body’s endogenous morphine levels, but his opiate receptors had been so stripped with flooding doses that it did not work anymore.

  “Muh, muh. Mum. Muh, muh! Uh-huh-huh…”

  He was weeping now. His mental faculties were completely gone. He was now almost like a broodling. Vilithe’s heart ached. To have a body this wrecked at only thirty-six Reathean revolutions.

  But this would truly be a mercy.

  An elvan deserves mercy.

  The abandoned ice pick, and other mining equipment, was left casually strewn aside. But the ice pick was perfectly clean, scoured by spirits. There was so much calculated cruelty in this place.

  holdPerson(

  target: Akangel Boucher,

  );

  Akangel froze. A tear rolled down his perfectly still, perfectly silent face.

  Her hand trembled, but she forced the nerves to obey. Still now.

  Vilithe grabbed the slender gryphantene ice pick, no more than a few millimeters in diameter, and shoved it past Arkangel’s eye, through his eye socket up into his cerebrum, and delicately but deftly cut out his prefrontal cortex.

  A lobotomy. Vilithe wasn’t delving into his mind at all, that would be simply masochistic. The easiest way to nullify a mind, render an elvan no longer elvan, but a mere animal, was still just simple physical surgery. It was unsettling to Vilithe that such a crude, old method still worked.

  The pain broke through her hold person on Arkangel.

  “AHH!” he shrieked, but he still held the same frozen position, though his muscles were twisted and contorted in strain.

  And then he abruptly stopped. She released the hold.

  “Derp.” the spirits had already set to work repairing the damage, thankful at least to no longer be exposed to the madness locked inside that little piece of brain all the way in the front, now isolated, alone even from its own body. Now what appeared to be Akangel was just a reptilian thing, just a limbic existence of breathing and chewing and swallowing. His limbs dropped and drooped, swaying. “Puh,” a line of drool fell from the corner of his lips, “derp…”

  She felt ratched. She bit her lip, lightly, to stave off the wave of nausea.

  She couldn’t end up like this poor creature. She couldn’t end like this. Vilithe was now very afraid that she may already be frayed. But how does someone know if they’re mad or not?

  The hard part was done. She sighed. Her work here was finished, some labor workers would later come and shuffle the poor creature to where he was supposed to be next.

  Now to give pleasure to the Amallarkean soldier.

  Meditation. She was once a master. She was still, she just could not remember.

  The center of the so-called ‘fight or flight’ reflex, also simply known as fear.

  What did you expect, scryer? A process so brutal it remained scarcely changed even well before the Lost Age.

  The prefrontal cortex, where all advanced cognition, indeed a person’s very personality, was housed.

  She didn’t know what that meant. It was like a combination of two different words – wretched and ratchet – though she knew that this word didn’t exist. But it was in fact a vestige of her connection with the legacy, when she once remembered Mildred Ratched.

  What if it was everyone else who was mad?