Excerpt: Empathy

Prologue

She lay crumpled unceremoniously against the moist stones, soaking in the darkness. Her frail form trembled unconsciously, her back spasming from time to time with unaccustomed pain. The sordid white gown that she so often wore on her little excursions to Calassi smelt heavily of blood and clung relentlessly to her lacerated back. The two silver wings curving from her delicate form seemed almost out of place in the gloom, though their gentle glow eased the darkness a little. The attempts that had been made to sever the fairy woman’s wings from her shoulders had obviously not been successful, but the healing process would be long and slow and stall her captors long enough to think of a new way to keep her incarcerated.
She half closed her eyes and listened to the dripping of water running through the crevices of the dungeon wall. She couldn’t blame them for what they had done to her. She knew what she had done was unorthodox. She had never meant for her moral lesson to stretch this far.
But they were afraid. And rightly so, she reasoned, because she had been the cause of the tension and now that they had her imprisoned, there was no reason to release her. She was their advantage, she knew, and she suspected she was the only one that they had. But she had seen glimpses of a far distant future, a future that loomed closer to humans and the fairies alike, and the very memory of it made her shudder. She refused to submit to hopelessness, but from the snippets of the outside world her greatly impaired magic allowed her to view, hope was not a prominent aspect. But the glimmer of a chance remained, and she hung on to it with all her might. “Ellyra…” she breathed, almost inaudibly, before succumbing to peaceful painlessness of deep sleep. Ellyra…