She couldn’t scream anymore. She tore her voice apart days ago. Was it days? Longer? She couldn’t tell anymore. That didn’t mean her body didn’t try every time. Didn’t mean she didn’t scream in pain to the point she’d be choking on her own blood.

They tell you of the heroes who are captured. How they eventually give in to the pain. That they are too weak to fight or stay conscious. Or they speak of how their mind wanders to another place. A memory perhaps. But that wasn’t the case. Not with her. She refused no matter how badly she wanted to. She would not leave the pain.

The words of the vile monster she placed on the throne did lose their meaning eventually though. She suspected she might have had her eardrums damaged. Or maybe had some kind of damage to her head that made her unable to truly comprehend the meaning. She didn’t know. What she did know was that her voice sounded as if she were underwater. The threats and the cruel, wicked, sweet words she spoke as she slowly unraveled her body to its last nerve were mostly incomprehensible. And she hated it. The hate, the anger, that she felt at them. They fuelled her for the first few weeks. But now she couldn’t understand them. She couldn’t no matter how much she tried to focus. She remembered the panic she felt once when she tried and tried and tried and it would just not come. But that panic was gone too. All she felt was pain. As if the Empress she once believed would better the world, the empress she fought for, the empress she placed on her throne, used her dark twisted power to replace everything she ever was with pain. As if every memory and emotion she ever felt was replaced by the eternal darkness that kept the monster alive.

That was the worst part. She remembered her mother - the queen of the dragons. But the empress twisted it to feel like nothing but pain. She remembered her people, the lands she fought for, the beautiful forests and the ancient magics hidden within, but it felt like nothing but pain. She remembered her oath, she remembered her name she remembered. She remembered it all. But felt nothing at all. Nothing but the darkness that twisted her to even less. And the pain. The endless, eternal pain.

And for what felt like a long time, that pain was the only thing keeping her going. That was the only driving force for her life to not give out. But then, there was that one final piece of her. Small and frail and slowly burning away at its edges.

Hope. It was strange, how powerful a mother’s bond could be, to a child she hasn’t seen in nearly 18 years. A child she had to hide before she knew it for even one. She felt that ever burning flame linking Hope to her heart.

She knew she would die here. Even if the rebels managed to find her. Save her. The damage was done. She would die here and never meet her daughter again. But Hope was alive. And that monster didn’t get her yet. She never would, even if she had to crawl through hell and the eternal darkness itself to kill the Empress herself, she’d never get her hands on Hope.

That was the last ember of the once great Flame of Learis. The last ember of hope keeping her head high as she marched on towards her end. She did not need to survive. She simply needed to think of the one thing she did right, when she saved her child, sending her across the seas beyond the Empire’s grasp.

She would die with Hope in her eyes, even if nothing else but pain and darkness remained. She grit her teeth as the pain overtook her once again.

She would not break. She never would.