story prologue

	A man, a woman, and a child. No, a man, a woman, and their child. No, wrong, again. A woman, her child and… a corpse. Yes, a woman, her child, and a corpse.
	It had been long. So very, very long since they had seen anything but the unbearably dull walls of this prison. The gray seemed to be taunting them, laughing at their inability to escape it and find anything of color. The closest thing was the woman’s tattered robes, and even those were so worn down that that they almost perfectly matched the gray on the walls.
	Gray. The color would never escape their minds, even if they did get out of this wretched place.
	She reminisced to when the corpse was not a corpse. Back in the days were she could feel the bliss of being with the one she loved, or the exhaustion after a long day of labor. She even missed the feeling of pain. Pain, of all things! At least it made her feel something. The woman might as well be the corpse rotting on the ground at this point.
	The man- her husband- had perished right after one of their experiments. Every day, the pair would hear a commotion, a mumbling of voices, and then a shuffling of feet. At first, it was silent for the rest of the day. As the mumbling became progressively closer, sometimes footsteps would return later in the day. Other times they wouldn’t.
	Soon the noise was right next to them. Three pairs of footsteps, followed by another pair from the cell. Sometimes these steps were eager, quite obviously for the ability to do anything but slowly be stultified in their cell. Other times, they were more reluctant, being wise enough to know that sometimes people wouldn’t return, or for some other unknown reason.
	That reason was revealed when the man next to them came back.
	The husband and wife leaned up to the bars as he returned, anxious to see what awaited them. What they saw was grotesque and menacing. What had been a shaggy, beaten-down man around the age of 50 was now… deformed. She wished she had known a better way to describe it. The man was groaning and convulsing, his skin a darkened shade of a grueling red, but the most jarring were the spikes. Each one was between a few inches to a foot long, protruding from his shoulders, arms, and legs giving a terrible sense of asymmetry. He no longer looked human.
	He was tossed in the cell and forgotten. There was no use for a failed experiment, was there? The poor man would only be recognized as data on a sheet.
	The two couldn’t sleep that night. A sense of restlessness emanated from the two of them, the only solace being that they were still together. They held each other close, trembling as they could almost imagine the three hooded figures looming over them, the threat feeling all too surreal to them after being trapped for so long.
	Neither of them trusted the existence of the Divines. Yet, they prayed anyway. A prayer to Argen for luck. To hope that they might randomly skip their cell, or maybe that he might survive to be what they were looking for. It wouldn’t be a desirable fate, but it was one where they could continue to live on. Another prayer to Vienn in hopes of the corruption being unable to reach them, and if so for them to live past it. Even a frivolous prayer for Metria for a hurricane to sweep through and break their prison.
	They didn’t skip the cell, nor did a freak weather accident save him. They only asked for the husband, leaving her alone in the cell with her child. He was barely sustained by her breast milk, and if her meager rations were any lower he’d be teetering on the edge of death. ‘As if he isn’t already…’ She thought solemnly.
	He returned later that day. The three hooded figures tossed him in the cell. He bore the same spikes as the other men, the same crimson skin. She knelt down and cupped his cheeks, tears streaming down her face. The eyes that stared back at her were blank, having lost all of their humanity. They stared off into nothingness. Not a single groan came from her beloved, only that haunting stare.
	Nothing was more crushing than when he gave his final breath. She let go of his head, gazing towards the ceiling and letting streams flow from her eyes. She looked defiantly at her child, having one simple thought: I will not let this happen again.