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I, II, III, IV. One, two, three, four.
They couldn’t tear their gaze away from the inert bodies floating in the liquid. All were part-tiefling, some with both horns and tails like Xiv, others winged or scaled. All had their father’s straight nose and square chin.
Five, six, seven, eight.
Their eyes trailed along the plaques above the jars. The numbers seemed to lose meaning the longer they stared. Father hadn’t taught them to read numerals — or even words, to some extent — but it wasn’t difficult to follow the pattern down and deeper down the corridor. They wished they hadn’t put the pieces together.
Nine, ten, eleven, twelve.
XIII. Thirteen… There was still some color to the face inside, its empty eyes staring straight through them.
The last jar was empty. None of that purple energy flowed through the tubes leading off it. Above the beckoning glass was the number X-I-V. Fourteen. Xiv.
They weren’t sure how long they stood there. Long enough to hear their father’s footsteps clacking outside the door.
Their whole life, all for this? Magic cultivated over two decades to fuel him like a battery? They weren’t a child to him. They were a body. A host for power that he would take by force.
Why? was the question reverberating through their mind. Why pretend to care when they got hurt or were hungry or tired? Why treat them like anything other than what he’d intended them to be? A buzzing was building in their chest alongside a shaky inhale. It spread to their shoulders, their knees, the end of their tail, the center of their head. They watched themself light up in the glass’s reflection, the same violet channeling along the ceiling aglow beneath their skin. It burned.
If Fourteen was just a number, why bother pretending it was a name?
Tears dripped down their face. The magic hurt like it never had before, hurt like the terror pounding through their heart. They needed time to process this, time they didn’t have.
A shadow fell from the doorway. When they looked up from the glass, they had only met his eye for a moment before the world went white.
They woke up in rubble and dust. Painful currents of magic still ran along their skin. Kicking desperately, tail flailing, they crawled out and stood. The empty doorway opened into ruins. Jars lay toppled and shattered in the night air, bodies strewn in the wreckage. Their head spun. They shook the debris from their hair. Trees towered around them, creaking quietly in a breeze. Their next inhale was deep, straining their lungs. Beyond the stone and stinging prickles of magic, the air smelled fresh. Alive.
Their face was still wet, and their legs were shaking terribly, but they felt warmer than they ever had, and a moon they’d only seen from windows was smiling down on them. One step, two, and they had left behind the familiar cobblestone for spongy dirt, and another, until they were running blindly into the forest. They counted their steps until they hit fourteen and shoved all thought of numbers from their mind.