Page 20 of A Spark So Bright
"Your winnings," the guard's voice came through the door.
Then it was opened, and a woman was pushed inside with him.
Gunnar wasn't sure what to do with that. The door sealed shut, the lock clicking into place rather ominously, and he was staring at what he was certain was a ghost.
The woman was just as covered in grime as he was. He could see the labyrinth had taken its toll on her as well. The threadbare clothing she wore hung off her thin shoulders like a sack, the bones in them protruding so much he figured he could have counted her ribs.
Her pale hair was nearly white as snow, though. Someone had recently washed it. Maybe just her head, considering the rest of her was just as dirty as he was. But she looked up at him withhollow eyes, and he didn't think she saw him at all. Pale icy eyes. The irises blended eerily into the whites.
"I am your prize," she said, her voice deeper than he expected. Raspy, as if she didn't use it very much.
He was stunned that a creature like her was still alive in this place. He couldn't move from the cot. Frozen where he was, half wrapping his bleeding knuckles as she reached for the hem of her dress and started pulling it up.
"Oh, no. Don't do that." He stayed where he was, hoping that she would see he wasn't a threat.
Clearly, this was a situation he could not control. This woman had been abused. She had been here too long, with far too many men pawing at her if she was so willing to remove her dress.
She didn't follow his quiet order. She just kept pulling that dress off herself, revealing inch after inch of bruised skin.
By the gods, she was so pale he could count her veins. And he had been right. There were far too many ribs showing, every single one of them casting hollow shadows that made her seem even thinner. Her collarbones were stark, and she'd lost so much weight that her breasts were nonexistent.
"Please," Gunnar said, slowly standing and holding his hands out in a peace offering. "Do not do this. There is no reason for you to remove your clothing. It is cold in here, fair lady. Put your dress back on."
But then he watched the strangest thing happen. She looked him in the eyes and then... disappeared.
Gunnar knew what a soul looked like leaving a person. There was a coldness to it as the body remained behind, empty and vacant. Such a thing usually only happened in death. She was still very much alive, just... not there.
He waved a hand in front of her face, trying to see if she would react to that at all. She didn't. She just stared at him, her jaw slightly slack, as though waiting for something to happen.
A deep ache burned in his chest. He couldn't leave this woman here. There were probably countless others just like her, all of them broken and beaten within an inch of their lives. But the moment he saw her soul drift away like that, he knew that there was no other path for him.
He would take her from this place. He would keep her safe because no one else had.
"Sit on the bed," he said, trying out a theory that she would take whatever she was ordered to do.
And she did. The woman walked right to the cot and sat down on it, nude and without caring that she was. She even started to lie down, but he stopped her before that happened.
"No, just sit."
He watched her sit there, her hands primly placed on her lap, and waited. She didn't move a muscle. Her body was breathing. He could see her taking slow inhalations. Ancestors, she was so thin he could see her heart beating between the hollows of her ribs. The artery down the center of her belly jumped with every beat as well, so easy for him to see that his heart broke.
Gunnar had no idea how long he waited. He wanted to see her do something. A finger twitch that might suggest the trauma was still in there, that a fight was still in her body. Nothing happened. Not even a thigh twitch, a shift of her toes, barely even a blink that was out of place.
He stood and blew air into her eyes, making them blink rapidly, but the moment he stopped, her eyes settled right back into the strange rhythm that was far too consistent for it to be natural.
This wasn't just obedience. This wasn't just trauma.
She really wasn't in there at all.
"Strange," he muttered as he stood, his knees creaking. He must have been crouched in front of her for a very long time for them to ache like that.
He had to know what was happening to her. Gunnar wasn't just any troll. He had traveled more than any of the others combined. He had seen kingdoms across miles of landscapes. He'd seen an ocean so large that the waves would have swallowed any ship that dared set sail. The world was an open storybook before him, and he had read every single page, but he had never seen a person do what she was doing now.
"Wandering souls," he said as he draped the only blanket in the room over her shoulders. "I never thought I'd see that in my lifetime. But your body remains behind as a puppet. That, fair one, is dangerous."
A vacant body was open too far too many things. After all, there were still spirits that haunted this place. He had never been so gifted as to see the dead, but he was certain there were plenty here. A soul could slip into a vacant body like this. They could take over her form, slither into that hollow place she'd left behind.
Didn't she know this? Didn't she know the danger of using magic?
