As it was, she was certain that she wouldn’t wake up thanks to the blood rushing to her head.
Alicia knew without a doubt that she would drown if that ever happened.
After she caught her breath, Alicia started to relax. Going up the wheel was infinitely better than going down. Far less stressful. Enough so that she often felt bored.
Bored! During torture!
She had lost count after about twenty revolutions, but she was running out of things to occupy herself with.
Alicia had already imagined herself in each of the other torture room implements. In comparison, the water-wheel wasn’t bad at all. There was another wheel device across the room; except that one looked designed to move along a bed of hot nails, pressing the helpless victim into them as it turned.
Her wheel didn’t even have spikes! What luck.
Sure, she might have preferred a stationary chair or bed of some sort. Most of those she could see had something uncomfortable about them, whether that be flames, more spikes, or a bladed pendulum. One device looked designed to dip a restrained person into a trough of molten lava.
On second thought, the water wheel was one of the best devices to be–
Alicia shook her head. Her mind was wandering, becoming loopy. She would rather not be tortured in the first place.
But as long as she was…
The wheel ground on, clicking and clanking as it brought Alicia up to face the ceiling.
This was even worse. At least there had been something interesting to look at before, even if they sent her mind down weird tangents.
Here, there was just the ceiling.
She had already counted every tile in the room.
Boredom was dangerous. Boredom led to sleep. Sleep led to drowning.
So Alicia turned her thoughts towards the same subject that always occupied her mind during this phase of the wheel.
Why is this happening to me?
She wasn’t being asked questions. She wasn’t being held for ransom, as far as she could tell.
No one had so much as been in the room since she had first awoken strapped to the wheel. No tell-tale rattling of skeletons, no draining of her blood for vampires, no stench of rotting corpses.
Though Alicia was willing to admit that she might have simply become used to whatever smell permeated the torture room.
Necromancers, or other undead, did not make much sense given that they had been battling demons. Alicia had no idea what to do about that. The meaningless torture made sense in that case; she wouldn’t put it past demons to torture her for fun. But something didn’t sit right with her about that. If she had been captured by demons or a diabolist, she would have expected there to be voyeurs.
Or more painful torture.
Someone was watching her. Upon first waking, she had attempted to connect to the source. The moment she had, the wheel spun and held her beneath the water until she stopped.
After refilling her lungs, she tried again.
Let it never be said that Alicia Heiden couldn’t learn a lesson. She hadn’t tried a third time.
The wheel clicked on. Alicia felt her heart pick up the pace as it worked overtime to keep all the blood flowing to the rest of her body.
While the other side of the room was as interesting as the first, she couldn’t spare it much thought. It only took a few minutes for the headache to settle in. Alicia pinched her eyes shut.
The clicking stopped.
Alicia snapped her eyes back open as the wheel ground to a halt.
Why did the clicking stop?
There was a low groan from somewhere deep within the wheel’s mechanisms.
Alicia had a bare instant to panic.
“Cra–”
The wheel spun under her weight.
She tried to take a gasp of air, but the wheel spun too fast.
Alicia crashed head-first into the trough of water.
Her lungs burned for oxygen. The small bit of water she had inhaled before submerging gave a need to cough.
I am going to die. Whatever kept the wheel turning broke and now I am going to drown in knee-deep water.
Her head broke the surface of the water a second later.
There must have been enough momentum to bring her head all the way through.
Alicia gasped and coughed at the same time, resulting in nothing but pain. She forced through the pain and took in as much air as she could before holding her breath.
She waited for the wheel to swing back under the water.
It never did.
The wheel lifted her until she was almost facing the ceiling again.
Two dead eyes obscured her view of the five-hundred-thirty-seven tiles. Long, platinum hair fell down the front and back of a dress cut for a scandal.
Finally, Alicia thought as she coughed and sputtered again, gasping for more air. Finally someone is here.
There was joy in her heart at that very fact. Anyone was better than no one. After Lord knows how long, another person was a Godsend. Unless she was hallucinating. Alicia would rather have no one than a hallucination.
But she didn’t look like a hallucination. A fresh corpse, maybe, but no hallucination.
Maybe she would be lucky and that corpse would mean necromancers. Alicia knew how to handle necromancers.
Unfortunately, most of the things she had been fighting before being captured had looked like corpses, yet the source insisted that they were part of a demon.
As she finally got off the emotional roller coaster that seeing something else caused, Alicia had to remind herself that this person was not a nun.
That meant that she was not her friend.
“So,” she managed between waterlogged coughs, “my host finally shows themselves.”
Without waiting for a response, Alicia gathered what was left of the fetid water in her mouth and spat at the woman.
Her eyes went wide as the small bit of water turned to ice. She heard it crash into the floor a moment after, all without the woman even twitching her fingers.
Ice blue lips tipped down into a disgusted frown. “Your disrespect is unappreciated.”
With that said, the woman turned and walked out of the room with all the grace and dignity of–of something very graceful and dignified.
As soon as the door slammed shut, the clicking started again.
And the wheel started turning.
—
The cranks stopped. A moment later and the wheel spun up to force Alicia to face the dead-eyed woman.
Finally
Alicia didn’t speak. She waited, enjoying the reprieve from the clicking and the turning.
She closed her eyes. It was hardly a break if she had to look at that woman’s face.
Counting backwards from ten wasn’t enough. It would have to do. She couldn’t remain silent forever.
“Do your wors–” Alicia’s eyes flicked over to some of the more creative pain-causing instruments in the room. “I’m not going to tell you anything.”
“We had yet to speak.”
Alicia frowned. ‘We?’ She craned her neck. There was no one else in the room as far as she could see.
“Doesn’t matter,” Alicia said with a shake of her head. “Whatever you want, I won’t betray my allies.”
“Allies?”
The woman tilted her head. She started bending over as if to sit despite there being nothing there to catch her.
Alicia smiled, preparing to laugh at the foolish woman when she sprawled herself out on the ground.
Her smile quickly vanished.
A massive chair–a throne, really–rose from the black marble tiles. Other than sitting down, the woman hadn’t made a single motion. She had no wand, no foci visible.
There must be someone out of sight casting these spells.
The woman’s elbow came to rest on one of the armrests. Her fingers curled under her chin.
Alicia’s wheel cranked downwards until she was eye-to-eye with the woman once again.
“What allies?”