by Sara Preucil
Unfortunately for her, someone must have witnessed her display, because within the next ten minutes, a woman on the street offered her a card on which, she claimed, was sprayed with a perfume she was selling. One sniff and Aria had become woozy; she distantly remembered being led into an alley, but then all she knew was darkness.
After she had woken, she found herself in a dank basement with dirt floors. Before she had a moment to collect herself, a door opened and a squat, fat man in a long purple coat walked into the basement, followed by a woman in a white lab coat and a couple of men in black suits.
“Where the hell am I?” Aria demanded. “Let me go!” She stood up, and on wobbly legs, took a few steps toward the group and the door behind them.
One of the suited men pointed a gun at her.
“You’re going to stay put,” the fat man said.
Aria stared at the gun. Would she be able to blast it out of the man’s hand before it fired? Probably not.
“I can see what you’re thinking, unnatural, but you better not try,” The fat man said, smiling at her. “I can tell you have fight in you. Perhaps after a couple of more hours below ground, you’ll be a bit calmer.”
Aria felt the grips of claustrophobia tighten around her throat. She hated not being able to see the sky, it felt like she couldn’t breathe.
The group turned to leave. Aria stood still as they exited. The last one to pass through the door was the man with the gun trained on her. Once the door shut, she bolted for it. She grabbed the handle, but the heavy metal door was locked tight.
Aria pounded a fist against the door. She gritted her teeth.
“Like hell I’m going to stay put.”
She backed away from the door and took a deep breath. She clapped her hands together at her chest, feeling the air rushing in from all around her. Slowly, she pulled her hands apart, focusing on the flow of air, condensing it into a whirling sphere between her palms. As she pulled her hands farther apart, the sphere grew. When she was certain that she had pulled all the air from the small basement room (as she was not able to suck in the smallest breath), she released the sphere.
Throwing her hands out in front of her like one might check a basketball, she sent the sphere hurtling toward the door. They collided, and with a thunderous bang, the door dented inward and then flew backward off its hinges. It hit the wall of a curved staircase beyond.
Aria sprinted through the hole where the door had just been, and headed for the stairs.
Something sharp jabbed into the back of her neck. Aria came to a halt and then swayed. Unable to control herself, she fell backward. Someone caught her before her head could smack the ground.
When she woke, she was in another grimy basement or cellar, and her hands and legs were tied down to a metal chair.
Aria lost count of how many days she spent locked up in that dank, windowless room. Eventually, she was allowed out of her restraints for small periods of time, but always ended up back in them when she had visitors.
She was given food and water, so it was clear that the Order intended to keep her alive. For the time being at least.
She was subjected to a number of experiments, but they were different from the “purification” rituals that she had heard about from first-hand accounts of reincarnated elementals who were unlucky enough to cross paths with the Order in a past life. By those accounts, she would have been smeared with dirt, maybe had some shoved down her throat, and then branded by their symbol and killed. These experiments appeared more delicate than that.
The windowless space had obviously been chosen with care, because the air was steadily growing staler, making Aria feel like she couldn’t breathe, let alone wield it for any purpose. She was pretty sure she was being fed dirt; the food she was given had a distinct earthy taste to it. She could feel herself becoming listless; her head was foggy, and she lacked the energy to do more than sneer at the fat man in the purple coat who, with his usual crew, would check in on her from time to time.
One day—she assumed it was during the day, it could have been the middle of the night for all she knew—that man and his entourage came with shovels. Aria watched in horror as they dug a deep, narrow hole in the dirt floor. What they intended next, she couldn’t quite wrap her head around, and gave very little struggle as she was pulled to her feet and practically dragged toward the hole. She was roughly placed inside the hole, which came up to her shoulders, and then they began to shovel the dirt back in.
That was when Aria started to panic. She thrashed around, trying to find purchase to pull herself out of the hole, but someone grabbed her by the shoulders and shoved her down. She could do no more than watch, and hysterically beg them to stop, as the hole slowly filled around her. The earth pressed against her body, cold and unyielding.
And then, they left her with just her head and neck sticking out of the hole. Her chest struggled against the pressure of the earth as she tried to breathe. She remained that way for hours.
After days of this torture, Aria had been brought before a large gathering of the Order. This, she barely recalled. On weakened legs and with a muddled head, she had been marched into a room full of candlelight and hooded figures. She remembered people talking. And then she remembered the pain. And her rage. And then nothing.
✽✽✽
The cage around Aria jostled again, bringing her thoughts careening back to the present. Frantically, Aria started shaking the bars, looking for the door; when she found the section that gave more than the other three, she reached a skinny arm through the bars and felt around for the latch. What she found, instead, was a large padlock.
She let out a frustrated cry and sat back, fighting the rising panic that pressed down on her chest, making breathing difficult.
“Hello?” She called out softly, unsure of whether she was more afraid of receiving a reply or none at all.
Nothing.
“Hello?” She tried again, a little louder this time. But it was fruitless. No one was out there.
She was completely alone.
End of Book One.
Credits
Translation for Dante’s Monarchy:
Henry, Aurelia. The De Monarchia of Dante Alighieri. Boston and New York. Houghton, Mifflin and Company. Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1904. Accessed January, 29, 2020. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_De_Monarchia_of_Dante_Alighieri/P9QGAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover.
Translation for Empedocles’s On Nature:
Janko, R. “EMPEDOCLES, ON NATURE I 233–364: A NEW RECONSTRUCTION OF P. STRASB. GR. INV. 1665–6.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 150 (2005): 1–26. Accessed March 8, 2018. http://ancphil.lsa.umich.edu/-/downloads/faculty/janko/empedocles-nature.pdf.
Translation for Kore Kosmou:
Kingsford, Anna and Edward Maitland. “Kore Kosmou, The Virgin of the Kosmos.” 1880. Accessed March 8, 2018. http://yperboreia.org/KoreKosmou.pdf.