𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐒 𝐈𝐒 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐀 𝐒𝐔𝐂𝐂𝐄𝐒𝐒 𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐘. 𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐒 𝐈𝐒 𝐀 𝐑𝐔𝐈𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍.
It's the beginning of a new age when Jaylah Imperatrix seemingly returns from the dead to reclaim her throne. And in perfect timing.
In her absence, evil has be...
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Act 1 Chapter 71 ALEXANDER
At first Alexander thought his eyes had somehow been sewn closed. But he blinked and felt the brush of his eyelashes on his cheeks. His body felt like a stone. Had he been drinking? The weight around his chest was perpetually squeezing off his air intake. Still groggy, he shifted ever so slightly.
Wait—
No, the weight stemmed from his neck. And his arms couldn't move. Unable to pick the freezing cold locks that rested against his wrists.
No...it couldn't be...
Alexander would know that feeling anywhere. Sometimes he woke up grasping his throat to be sure it was not actually there. That was it. Any moment now, he would wake and laugh at his own childish fear.
He blinked several more times. He could not wake up from this nightmare because he was truly there, truly back in the dark shed he spent so many years dreading.
Panic mounted. His chest heaved up and down, chains clanking and he tried his hardest to free his hands so that he could claw at the collar. His movements only brought crippling pain that shot through every part of his upper body, but even then he couldn't stop fighting. He was choking, strangling and he needed to get free just for a second, just so his head would stop spinning and his stomach would stop churning. But Alexander's limbs weren't his anymore, were they? His body had been sold.
He was going to die there.
The overwhelming awareness that he was really back in the collar of a slave was too painful to bear. All he wanted was to be free. Why was that too much to ask? Because he dared to spread his wings, he now drowned in iron as he died over and over with every new realization. Every menial memory he'd blocked out for his own sanity. The water pails in the barracks, the mud and Hounds-knew-what caked in the murky bottoms. The open rooms filled with thick coughs and flies and body odor when he was just trying to get to sleep each night. The downtrodden faces of the others that told him they had long since lost hope. How let down they were going to look when they saw he had managed to get dragged back. How sad his mother, and even Igor, would be.
Every part of him was reduced to shaking, weak jelly. It did not feel normal to be this cold; his very bones were ice. He still couldn't breathe. Even gaping mouthfuls of air weren't enough.
Alexander could not fall apart here. He grasped for something, anything more powerful than the crippling, all-consuming knowledge that he was going to spend the rest of his days with his head under a cruel master's boot.
The whole world stopped turning when it hit him. Even his blood stopped roaring in his head. The fear froze in time. Who had put him here?
