Their names were jokes…Mirkur meant “darkness” in the Gamla Toonkumowl while Owraythu meant “chaos.” The silly blue men claimed they were brother and sister, and worse yet, ancient gods of great power. It made sense that the Plowir Medn would worship deities who claimed to embody darkness and chaos. As a race, they embraced disorder…they seemed to feed off it.

How long Owraythu had kept her imprisoned, she couldn't say. An hour? A day? A year? She had no idea—time was meaningless in this eternally variegated changing pattern of colors and images.

The last thing she remembered was Owraythu saying, “You refused to play by the rules. For that, you will pay the price.” And…

The pain had engulfed her, then. Wave after wave of nauseating agony seared her nerves and racked her body. Her muscles had refused to obey her, even her mouth and throat. She hadn't even been able to scream.

It had gone on and on, just her and the pain. Her senses had shut down one by one, her vision, her sense of smell, her hearing, her sense of touch, and even the taste of her tongue in her own mouth as it dried. Only the pain had been constant.

When the darkness had overtaken her mind, she had welcomed its release, but now she regretted the loss…of memory, of her sense of place in the universe. What did they do to me while my mind rebelled and ran away from the pain? Where am I, and more importantly, how can I escape? How can I get back to my war?

“Lyows!” she said into the dead space in which she hung. Nothing happened, and a tingle of fear rattled around her belly like dice in a gaming cup. Her memory of what had happened after Owraythu had told her she would pay the price was fuzzy. She thought something else had happened, but she couldn't pin it down. “Luka! Where are you, my Champion?” she yelled.

Nothing and no one answered her, not even the echo of her own voice. She was alone. A mere mote of sentience in a polychromatic nightmare.
She no longer felt any pain—she no longer felt anything. Her skin was neither hot nor cold—it was as though whatever surrounded her maintained the same temperature as her body. Even the air enwrapped her in stillness…no breeze…nothing.

Owraythu had mentioned something about Hel’s refusal to play by the rules…but what did she mean by that? Was it a reference to breaking the Ayn Loug? Or did it have a more sinister meaning? Hel didn’t know and was not sure she cared.

She drifted through the orgy of hues, the mad finger painting of Owraythu and Mirkur on the satin black canvas of the place in which they incarcerated her. Well, maybe Owraythu alone had created the superfluity of color, since the shades of soot accounted for every tincture on Mirkur’s palette. Her eyelids drooped to half-cover her eyes, and her eyes unfocused. Her mind ran down, thoughts coming slower and slower until she drifted in a fugue of non-thought, of nothingness in stark contrast to the chaos of exploding colors she drowned in.

Time lost all meaning. One moment was indistinguishable from the next. Nothing happened, nothing marked the passage of time—no sun arcing through the sky, no pitter-patter of animal life, no people, no weather, no sounds of sea or wind or war. Nothing.

Just nothingness.

“This one senses you’ve awakened,” said a voice like fingernails scratched across textured glass.

Owraythu, Hel thought.

“As good a cognomen as any other.” The voice seemed to growl from the very air, from all around her, the rumbling staccato of a machine gun nest.

“Why… What do…”

“Cease!” snapped Owraythu. “The time for this one to talk has arrived, and with it, the time for you to listen.”
“Wait a minute! I’m the rightful—”

“Desist in this irrelevant clangor!” Owraythu’s voice thundered, adding artillery barrages to the persistent drumming of machine guns, painful to the ear and brain.

Hel’s jaw and tongue worked, but no sound came out. She could breathe, but she could not speak. She couldn’t even form coherent speech in her own mind.

“Sibling?”

Half the space around Hel dimmed as if someone had turned down the rheostat governing the saturation of the colors swirling around her. The colors leached out of the nothingness encircling her, and Hel understood the true meaning of nothingness. She tried to turn so that all she saw was the psychotic symphony of shades, but the umbral midnight murk moved with her. Either that, or the sensation of moving was hallucinatory, and she hung motionless instead of twisting like a fish on a line.

“This one does not savor the presence of this…this…this woman. If she can still be cleped thus.”

“This one comprehends your distaste but abandon your disquiet. She will either assimilate, or she will suffer in this crucible of torment this one has created.”

Hel wanted to say she would listen, she tried to nod, to kneel, to do anything, but Owraythu denied her all forms of communication. She hung, speechless, motionless, expressionless.

“She is…” said Mirkur, and his voice abraded Hel’s nerves.

“Yes,” said Owraythu. “She entreats us to reform her errancy.”

“Affirmation. The small one demands correction.”

The darkness seemed to pulse with the arrant lack of light, or perhaps it breathed. Hel couldn’t stand to look at it.

“Her capacity to perceive our realm for what it is reeks of the lacking,” said Owraythu. “Baseness and avarice are the sui generis roots of her psyche, in part—”

“Inconsequence,” said Mirkur.

“Yes, yet her pattern of cognition resides at the root of her error. This small one conjectures her disgraceful creed protects her from—”
“She shall learn.”

Owraythu said nothing, but the paroxysmal bursts of color shouted her pique at being interrupted. At least that’s how it seemed to Hel.

“She will take correction.”

“Agreement.”

“This one requires that she dwell here in suffering until she grows submissive and—”

“This one assimilates, Mirkur. Leave the chore with this one. The task will consummate in success, or the task shall continue without end, without pause.”

The categorical, tenebrous lack of everything related to light and life faded, replaced by a detonation of color that threatened to sear Hel’s brain. In it, Hel thought she detected a sense of maleficent triumph in Owraythu’s interruption of Mirkur’s thoughts. Like called to like, after all.

“Alone at last,” crooned Owraythu. “Allow this one to begin.” The myriad hues and shades surrounding Hel pulsed faster and faster—like the heartbeat of a sprinting woman. “This one has such sublimities to share with you.”