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Silent Treatment
Kai cried out and doubled over in pain, clutching his abdomen. "What the hell are you doing to me?!" he growled past clenched, shuddering teeth.
"Just bear it for a second longer. Just a second longer!" Erasmus said. Sweat trickled down his brow and dripped onto the floor. The hand he was holding up pointed at Kai glowed a fierce red that cast a freaky reddish hue across the entire laboratory.
"Ahh!" Kai cried out, squeezing his eyes shut, as if that could somehow make the pain fade away. His howling cries shook the laboratory's stone walls and trembled the delicate glass apparatus. He sounded like a werewolf being tortured in a cave.
"You're hurting him!" Ryodan barked, his voice thunderous.
"That's the point!"
"If you harm a single perfect hair on our prince's head-"
"Be quiet and let me concentrate!"
Kai's heart was being ripped from his chest. Someone had shoved a hand through his ribcage, pried the ribs aside, grabbed his beating heart, squeezed and then ripped it right out of his chest cavity.
His knees buckled and he fell -but Ryodan was there to catch him before his head struck the ground.
"Shit. Stop it now!"
"Fuck." Erasmus cursed, and through the lips of a child, it sounded so very wrong.
Kai's vision blurred and then his eyes rolled back into his sockets.
****
"He didn't show." Kai said once he regained consciousness. He expected to feel the pain or some dull ache at the very least, but he felt absolutely fine.
A glance around revealed to him that he lay on a bed in one of the mansion's rooms. Erasmus sat on a high stool, elevating him to Kai's eye level. Ryodan was nowhere to be seen. It seemed that Erasmus didn't use bioluminescent jellyfish to light up his mansion, something he found to be commendable. Instead, a blue fire crackled in the hearth, warming him to a suffocating point. Kai recalled reading somewhere that a blue fire was more powerful and burned hotter than a red fire.
As if sensing his discomfort, Erasmus waved his hand and the blue fire instantly died.
Kai wanted to do magic too. If there was a way to learn it, he'd do it. It would add to his non-existent arsenal of weapons.
"It appears your connection has been severed." Erasmus said, his face grim.
Kai closed his eyes for a moment. He didn't have to ask what that meant to realize how bad it sounded.
He'd screwed up big time, though he couldn't remember much about it. Therein lay the crux of the problem. Both he and Erasmus suspected he'd done something -other than punch the golden merman in the face and command him to leave-to anger him beyond responsiveness. In other words, he was getting the silent treatment. And not even the looming threat of death could get the Spirit out of its reclusion.
"Can you remember why the Spirit is so dissatisfied with you?" Erasmus said.
Kai sat up and leaned against the headboard. "No, I don't. I've tried to remember what happened in the arena, how I'd teleported out of Nostraza, but I just... can't."
"What's blocking your mind?" Erasmus asked.
Kai frowned. "Blocking my mind? What do you mean?"
"You have repressed memories. There's a part of you that doesn't want to remember what happened. Memories become repressed when an individual experiences a traumatic event. Most likely what you're experiencing is traumatic amnesia," he explained patiently.
It sounded like science fiction. Could something like that really happen to him? So far, he'd handled all that was thrown at him reasonably well. And what a shitshow it had been. Had something finally broken the camel's back? Wiped his memory for his own sake?
If so, he had to admit to himself that he was a little afraid to remember what...
"To tell you the truth, I want to forget all about this... This." Kai waved his hands around to indicate his whole debacle of a life.
A look of understanding came over Erasmus' face. "That's probably one of the reasons why the Spirit is uncooperative and reclusive." His eyes narrowed into suspicious slits at Kai. "You think this change in your life is temporary, don't you? That you can somehow go back to your old life and forget about this as if it were a nightmare." His mentor exhaled a puff of air, then accused as it were the foulest of deeds, "You haven't accepted your heritage, let alone the Spirit."
Kai didn't say anything. He didn't have to; Erasmus' deduction was spot on.
Erasmus said, "Kai, the Spirit of the Sea is a very jealous, very possessive, very prideful entity. The Spirit wants to monopolize its vessel, be its morning and evening star, so to speak. If the vessel refuses to acknowledge or accept the Spirit, the Spirit rebels and distances itself from its host. There will come a point..."
When he trailed off, Kai muttered, "Go on. Just say it."
"The Spirit might not come to your rescue when you need it to. It might leave you to die."
The statement fell like a hammer on an anvil.
Kai recalled the first time the Spirit appeared to him. It had been so kind and welcoming. It had even looked happy to see him. Most importantly, it had saved him from drowning, from certain death.
He was grateful for the golden merman's help. Really, he was. He wouldn't be here otherwise, he knew as much.
But the Spirit had given him a promise that he'd always come to his rescue, and Kai had depended on that promise, turning to the Spirit for assistance multiple times when Marius threatened and humiliated him. God, he'd been so painfully, embarrassingly desperate. So weak and pathetic, it made his mouth taste bitter-sour.
When he'd argued that he'd been in danger in that cage with Sh'tara, the Spirit had dismissively insisted that he was not in enough danger to warrant his interference.
Again, he'd called upon him in the arena. The Spirit hadn't even bothered to answer.
And so Kai had desperately... done something.
It was this something that his mind had blocked.
He groaned and his hand instinctively flew to his head. He pinched the bridge of his nose; his sinuses were suddenly acting up. His head felt like it was about to implode.
Remembering, or trying to, was making him dizzy.
"What is it? Are you remembering?" Erasmus asked, concerned.
"I... I..."
It was gone. The memory thread had slipped out of his hand.
He sighed wholeheartedly, and he wasn't sure that it was because he was relieved.
"It's gone. The memory's g-"
Kai looked up to see that Erasmus and his stool were gone. In fact, even the bed that Kai had lain in was gone. The entire mansion had dissolved away, leaving him sitting on the ground, blinking in dumbfounded confusion like a fool.
He was now someplace else, someplace horrifyingly familiar.
"No..." he breathed, horror-stricken.
In his peripheral, he spotted something golden clasping his ankle. When he looked down, his stomach plummeted. It was the Master's Chain. It had reappeared.
"Didn't I tell you that there's no place you can run to that I can't reach?"
Kai's heart seized. The blood drained from his body as if he'd been sucked dry by a bloodthirsty vampire. He felt sick.
The golden chain tightened around his ankle and he gasped.
Slowly, he turned around to see none other than King Marius the Conqueror towering over him.
*~~~~~~*
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