Two Months Later.
Silence.
The purest of atmospheres. An absence of everything else, but that which is nothing. No whispers, no heartbeats of the earth, and no calls of nature. It was a hollow, empty shell, but a void that invited the beautiful ability of creation. It was a silence that was the beginning and the end, the love and the hate, the hurt and the joy.
Focus. Focus your mind on the silence and let it fill you. For this silence can be found in the most noisy of places, the distracting and the raucous. If you were in the heat of battle you could believe in the absence of all else except this silence. For this silence is the truth between all things, the space between realms. It is the time of no air, the distance between the magical world and the physical one. All you need to do is focus and you can find it.
Focus.
Focus.
Focus.
"For heaven's sake just focus!"
A voice. The voice. His voice. Ruining it, ending it, breaking the silence's reign.
Swiftly she turned from the stunned and shivering pig in the corner of the room, twisting right around to face him, lounging there in his throne-like chair. Indeed, he was sitting in an agitated manner, but it did not take away from the relaxed aristocratic role he took. Anger permeated her face, not too different from the hateful rage that had been filling her before. Letting her claws scrape the fine tiles of the floor, she rose, like an eagle from its nest.
"Shouting at me does not involve more focus," she growled, her hands rolling into fists. "In fact it takes away from what I am trying already."
"The pig is still the same as the last ten," Vitruvion replied, spreading a thin and pale fingered hand towards the swine. "Exactly the same, in fact. You have not improved."
Avis was incredulous. "Vitruvion, one interrupting me every time you want me to do better doesn't help. Two, it's a pig, they're all pigs, so they can't tell us what they're experiencing. Three, I have practically no idea what I am doing with this, so complaining at me to try to 'improve' is not going to work in these circumstances."
"Your powers are triggered by your intense feelings of hate, fear, anger ... and others," he shrugged. "That we know, therefore we can say we are a large part of the way to understanding your ability."
"But not all of it," she stressed, throwing her hands up. Then she sighed with a groan and ran fingers through the feathers about her head. "I don't know what I am, and you said you would be able to figure it out."
He watched her then, in silence but with his eyebrow raised. He watched as her focus slipped from him to the ground, staring at the tiles around her feet in the small basement room. The walls were simply plastered and the ceiling had a small hanging chandelier, and the only furniture was Vitruvion's lordly chair. Else, the room was bare, and a set of wooden stairs led to the next floor. It was a far cry from the underground labyrinth tunnels of the Hollow, where Vitruvion had kept her the first four months of their acquaintance. For above the basement was a servants mess hall. And by that a kitchen. And that kitchen led up to a grand dining hall which was the centre of the glorious town mansion that was Vitruvion's city home in Beinost.
His true home. Where he resided when he was not in the Hollow. His business home. And the same home where he had brought Avis two weeks after he had resolved to have her at his side for the rest of her life.
"I said we would explore the situation, Stare," he said, using the name that had originally been formed when she was a simple slave concubine in his empire of the Hollow. Now she was his ... Whatever she was, though still a slave under his pretense of near to official documentation. "I did not say I would provide direct answers. For I have as much interest in this as you. Otherwise I would have kept you in the Hollow, chained as you were. I wouldn't have gone through these extensive measures to keep you at my side."
Avis did not respond. She had very little to say. Her right hand wandered over to her left wrist, where a small scrap of leather was bound. It hid a cuff, one that had been designed, made and placed on her by Vitruvion. He watched as she held it in her hand, and folded his own left hand into a fist. In his third finger sat a dull silver ring, and it was onto this he concentrated. For the ring was joined directly to the cuff, the master over the subjugated. Through it he could see what she could, hear what she could, know her thoughts, and never the other way around. She would never know when he was in her mind, and she could never take the cuff off. It was bound shut with impossible metal thread that was part of the cuff itself, but his could be removed. In essence, he was the controller, she was his device, and if she ever considered anything less his celestial power could be called through it to fill her body with frigid, unyielding pain.
Very gently he poked at her conciousness, somewhere near her hip. Suddenly, as the vivid physicality of the prod came to be, and Avis was struck by a short but agonising sting. Gasping, her body flinched with a uncommanded convulsion, and she lifted her head up to look at him with wide, stormy eyes.
"Good," he said. "You are paying attention again. Let us finish for the day." He nodded to the corner where the supine creature had now toppled onto its side, eyes rolled back, dumb. "Deal with that. I will be down in the Hollow for the rest of the evening." He began to rise from the chair.
Gulping in air, gaining back her sanity from the cruel though brief stab of pain, Avis stuttered as she responded. "Th-that's not my job," her voice was near breathless. "I don't know anything about-"
But he was already walking, striding long footsteps over to the stairs. "I will see you in the morning," he said, entirely ignoring her. "As usual, do not leave your room once you are finished here. Brer will be here tonight to watch you."
With no cane in hand it was his footsteps that were his rhythm. It matched the feverish beat of her heart as she watched him leave. His eyes did not meet hers, they were mere shadows that drifted away and like the very same he carried himself up the wooden steps. Hardened leather boots carried a dull tone, and even as her beak snapped shut as she body gained breath once more. Good breath, stable breath, back from then brink that his dark humour created.
Thud.
The door from the top of the stairs closed with a loud tone. Still feeling tender, she recoiled protectively inwards. Her arms crossed over her chest, she glanced back to the resting pig in the corner and let out a slow sigh before picking her way towards it. Tomorrow, the beast would be sold to the butcher. In a few months time it would die. Sometime in the next week a new pig would arrive, and the same cycle would continue. Gain the pig, stun the pig, sell the pig, forget the pig.
Avis grabbed a rope from the floor, that had been half hidden by shadows, and found the looped end. Going over, she hooked it around the dazed animal's neck and began the long task of encouraging it from the room. It was not the first time she had done this, and it would not be the last. But it was not her speciality, and it was not her ken. The pig squealed, and she did the only thing she knew and pulled on until it followed her up the stairs.
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