Grianne Ohmsford lay with her face pressed against the stone floor of her cell, her eyes closed. She was trying to escape, even though there was nowhere to run. Torchlight from the hallway beyond intruded on the darkness in which she wished to hide. Low voices and the soft shuffling of boots nudged her out of her hiding places. Water dripped and the earth rumbled deep within its core, reminders of where she was. Like hungry predators from the black holes into which she had tried to banish them, memories emerged and made her skin crawl.

But it was the mewling cries of the Furies, triggers to a mix of horror and madness from which there was no escape, that chased her down and found her out no matter how far inside herself she retreated. She cringed from them, drawing up into a ball, becoming as small and still as possible, willing herself to disappear. But nothing helped. She had used her magic to become one of them, and she could not change back again. She mewled with them. She hissed and snarled with them. She spit with poisonous intent. She flexed her claws and drew back her muzzle. She rose to greet them, responding to their summoning, a response she loathed but could not prevent.

She squeezed her eyes so tightly shut they hurt. She would have cried had there been tears to do so. Her world was a room six feet by ten feet, but it might as well have been the size of a coffin.

They had returned her to her cell from the arena in the same way they had brought her, in a cage and in chains, Goblins and demonwolves surrounding her, Hobstull directing them. Back through the crowds and the blasted countryside. Back through the gloom and mist. Time had stopped, and her sense of herself and her place had disappeared. She was a captured beast. She was a lifetime removed from her role as Ard Rhys, and the Druids and Paranor were a dim memory. All the way back, she fought to regain her identity, but the rolling and the jouncing seemed only to exacerbate her confusion. It was easier to disappear into the role she had adopted than to try to follow the threads that might lead her out. It was simpler to embrace the primal creature she had awakened than to cast it aside.

They stripped and bathed her on her return, and she did not try to stop them. She stood naked and exposed and uncaring, gone so deep inside herself that she felt nothing of what they did to her. Cat sounds issued from her lips and her fingers flexed, but she did not see the way her captors drew back. She did not see them at all. She did not know they were there.

I am lost, she thought at one point. I am destroyed, and I have done it to myself.