Everyone tells stories.  I sometimes think we exist in order to tell stories.<br/><br/>I put my boot up on the fallen log and pull out two of my daggers. Each of them has a story; one I used to carve my name into a tree in my father's woods, a sinister, treasonous, thrilling act.  The other I once used to slice apples around a campfire the night I killed my first boar.  These knives mean something; they are something more because of those stories.<br/><br/>"Bring the man here please, Marius."  I do not speak quickly, but quickness is in my tone.  And Marius, eager to move and all the more eager to remove the laughing raider from disturbing Amara, hauls the raider over.<br/><br/>The man kicks feebly; he is not so bold as when he roared in Amara' face, but he is still snarling, still with metal for marrow.  I take hold of his arm and twist it, setting his palm against the log, so that his neck rests on the wood with his arm fully extended.<br/><br/>"Hold his other arm against the log.  Just like this." I tell Marius.  Marius' glare is all knives, and he complies harshly.  The man stop snarling.  His eyes go wide with what is going to happen.<br/><br/>Perhaps he has heard this story before.<br/><br/>Wotan and the World Tree.  My father told it to me personally, several nights, by the light of an ornate bronze candlestick on the rare occasions he put me to sleep.  I would listen, rapt, to how Wotan, our All-Father, spiked himself to a tree to learn the secrets of the world.  To this day, ornate bronze candlesticks always make me think of mysteries; always make me smell my father's beard.<br/><br/>A lyre is treasured for the haunting melody it played at your wedding.  A cradle is worth the memories of the child that grew in it.  A sword is just a sword until it becomes Excalibur.  We value these things because we cannot do without their stories.  Their stories compel; they haunt.<br/><br/>Possessions are valued by the degree they possess us.<br/><br/>I drive the dagger in a single motion through the back of the man's hand and into the wood, and by the time the blood is beginning to leak from the white, smooth mouth of the wound, the man is screaming.  He is thrashing.  He has pissed his breeches.<br/><br/>I wonder if Wotan pissed his breeches.<br/><br/>I drive the other dagger through the other hand as Marius holds him down.  The atmosphere seems colder now.  Like Marius and Amara's blood has become like the mist.  And I am very cold.  I feel nothing.  This story isn't about me feeling anything.  This is the raider's story to tell.<br/><br/>He is screaming horribly, and Marius and Amara look as lost and as inertial as the mist.  They cohere to one another.  One makes a noise when I pull out the leather awl and the pliers.<br/><br/>The raider stops screaming.  Starts wimpering.  Starts crying like an abandoned baby.<br/><br/>I doubt Wotan pissed his breeches.<br/><br/>I walk over to the man - pliers open in one hand, their needlelike teeth splayed in theatric, yawning hunger; leather awl in the other.  I show him both.  I show him, most importantly, my face.  My face has no expression.  No anger and no fear.  No guilt.  It is pure snow.  Nothing living can grow there.<br/><br/>He looks at me and goes very white.  He's not posturing now, or laughing.  I look at him and realize that, yes, this is a baby once cradled.  This is a young boy who touched a flower without breaking it.  This is a teen who was once driven near to tears with loneliness and want.<br/>This is man.<br/><br/>He has a story.<br/><br/>And that is why I lean in and begin to hurt him.<br/><br/>I hurt him very quickly and very effectively.  I hurt him to hurt him, not to injure him or to kill him.  I hurt him worse than he could have imagined he would ever be hurt.<br/><br/>I use the awl on his gummy, tender nipples and then twist them around the point with the pliers.  And then I take the point out of them and push it through the soft flesh between his eyelid and eye, several points, several times.  I take four fingernails out of their sensitive, gristly housings and I put them in his screaming mouth.  I open his belt.<br/><br/>Then I pause.<br/><br/>There's a theory somewhere, I think among the Aquilonians, that torture doesn't work to get answers.  The theory goes that the victim will just tell the torturer whatever they think the torturer wants to hear.  These theoreticians have no idea.<br/><br/>Torture is not about asking questions and inflicting pain when the answer is not given.  Torture is about rendering the subject completely helpless - helpless to their own pain, to their fear, to the animal experience of being hurt and not being able to do anything about it.  Asking questions would defeat the purpose.  It would give the subject hope.<br/><br/>In torture, true torture, you hurt and hurt and hurt and hurt the subject.  And when they can no longer think, no longer form a rational idea of what might be right or wrong, or true or false, or good or bad, or would save them or damn them - when they are just pain - then you say you are ready to listen.  When all hope, even the hope of appeasing you, is gone, then you listen.<br/><br/>After "stop," and "please," and "no," and "why," and "I'll tell you anything," and "mother," and "God," and the worst of the sobbing.  Then you listen.<br/><br/>After I open his pants, bearing him, threatening him, shaming him; after I have opened him with metal and with my coldness, I listen.<br/><br/>And he tells me a story:<br/><br/>The Temple of the Amber Wound was not always a blight on the flesh of the world.<br/><br/>It was once a great civilization, with golden towers and platinum wisdom.  It had machines and magicks the likes would which would astound even the transmogrifiers of Quard or the purple-fingered evokers of the Great Salton Sea.  There, the marvels of the universe were captives of the inhabitants, wrapped in packages to be given as mere presents, or mused over as if as much a matter of course as the fall of the rain.<br/><br/>All marvels but time.<br/><br/>At this point, the raider is unsure about what happened.  He knows only that it was experiments into immortality that brought the civilization that built the Temple of the Amber Wound to its end.  Something broke in one of their cosmic engines; some spell slipped its tether and went awry.<br/><br/>And something, from beyond time, came here to claim this place.<br/><br/>I don't blame the raider for his ignorance.  I know he is trying to do his best.  This is, after all, his story to tell.  It's why he's here, why I hurt him, why this is all happening.  He does the best he can in his defining moment.  Wotan, after all, did not piss his breeches.<br/><br/>The 'Something' was subdued - driven to sleep - by the magics the people employed.  But it had brought corruption with it, and strange beasts, and so the wreckage of this great civilization was complete.  Worst of all, time had soured here.  Time curdled.<br/><br/>"It does weird things to a man's spirit, living here," the raider moans.  "It gives black desires to a body."<br/><br/>And so the civilization was scattered, and the sundered, amber-and-gold city forgotten, lost to antiquity and to those discoverers who knew to pass it by with a curse as The Temple of the Amber Wound.<br/><br/>Yet the leader of the raiders, come lo these two decades ago, did not pass it by.  Sonchis was a priest, already stewing with perverse aims and appetites, and so he stayed.  He learned the ways of the Bog Dwellers.  He initiated the old magics, and stirred the amber wound to full fester again.<br/><br/>And he recruited men like the raider.  It was easy enough; kidnapping someone and keeping them in this place for more than a single day would be enough to give odd desires to any.  In a week, even the most stalwart soul would become deranged.<br/><br/>No time to waste then, I resolved.<br/><br/>I began asking pointed questions.  Directions were given to a number of locations:  The Hive, where the Bog Dwellers abide.  The Redoubt, the fortresslike raider camp.  The Gouge, where the Something, supreme and slumbering force that came to spoil the world waits for Sonchis to wake it.<br/><br/>"We have no time to waste," I inform Marius.<br/><br/>"Let us follow your intuition," I tell Amara.<br/><br/>One last question I asked, before preparing to remove the daggers.<br/><br/>"Why are there no female Bog Dwellers and raiders?"  I ask the raider.<br/><br/>"Only those in the Hive know for sure.  For that's where all the girls go."  He says.  He's not sneering now.  Not smiling or smart.  He's hurt too badly to be other than a hurt piece of humanity; just an abandoned baby.  Just a story.<br/><br/>I take the daggers out, and we move, leaving the raider behind - no time to even kill him; no time to waste - chasing our happy ending down.