[Amelia Lynsdaughter]

They were watching her.

The realization hit her like an anvil as soon as she let her eyes wander from the ceiling of the crypt, staring at the perimeter of the circle. She was a strange animal, exposed for the enjoyment of these ghosts and spirits flocking into this place to watch her pain and revel in it. You couldn't get much more humiliated than this. But she still lived, and now that Amelia had tasted a morsel of hope, she wasn't going to let go of it that easily. Even if she had nothing, she would cling to that nothing with all of herself.

With her head being given a few more degrees of freedom, she stared back at them. Even without the herbs Shiandi had stuffed into her mouth, she would have felt the bitter taste of indignity. The girl did not rebel to Shiandi washing the blood away from her body, even though the act did not make her feel any less dirty than before. The snippets in the foreign tongue she could now understand did, however, give her a revelation. It was all a huge deją vu, all of it. She had lived through this once before, the brightening she had been branded as an Outlaw. Had Shiandi not given her a new brand on her tongue? The threats, the pain, the shame, but above all... the eyes. Granted, not all of these things had eyes, but Amelia could still feel them watch her. Eyes that judged.

Eyes without the slightest trace of mercy in them. Eyes that would not close. Countless eyes basking in her pain. She had been all but destroyed by those eyes, more so than by the branding or the loss of status. Those eyes had always reminded her that no-one would ever accept her, that her continuing to live was an insult in and of itself, that she had only lived on because she lacked the courage to kill herself. She realized how things changed and yet remained the same as Shiandi stepped outside her circle, rendering it useless and granting them entrance.

The newborn Adjurator felt them over her body, listening to their plans and how much they were going to enjoy this. She only wished they would leave Father alone as they could probably bring more pain upon him than they could on her. Strangely enough, she did not scream for the first twenty seconds or so, simply listening with detached ears to their proposals, to what they were going to do to her if they had their way. She did not know whether Shiandi would let them, but she did understand one thing in those twenty seconds, covered under a blanked of spirits and ghosts.

That in order to make the unforgiving eyes go away, there were only two ways. Amelia would have to disappear altogether, or force those eyes shut. One path led to oblivion, the other to a battle that had nothing to do with weapons. And even if she was petty and insignificant beyond recognition...

... her enemies were even more so. While Lady Shiandi commanded blind fear in the heart of her apprentice because she had managed to put a leash on Amelia and her agenda lay beyond her understanding, these ghosts and spirits seemed quite pathetic behind their threats if one only stopped to think. Ghosts so envious of the life they had lost that they enjoyed others being stripped of theirs, and spirits entirely bent on their little planar selves. No wonder they treasured their names so; it was pretty much the only thing setting them apart from each other. Little, unthinking maggots.

A guttural sound came out of her throat as she struggled to get free from the straps, though there was far more rage than fear in it this time. Shiandi deserved being feared because the half-Elf did not know who the witch really was, but these beings she could actually understand, and understanding cancels fear. She decided to tell them so, and despite the leaves in her mouth and her wounded tongue, she tried to speak as best she could. "Don't touch me!" was the sentence of choice, more of an order than a supplication, and then it occurred to Amelia that if she could understand the language Shiandi had used, then it was reasonable to assume that she could also speak it. She looked for those words in her mind, words that, if found, would allow her to exclaim "Don't touch me!" in that obscure language of the non-living.