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Ritual of the Wild-Hearted For ArrowQuivershaft By Draconicon

Despite being touched by something magical and fantastic, Richard had never believed that something like this would happen to him. Sure, there were a hundred different stories where people with magical abilities were captured and tortured by crazy cults, but those were stories, not real life. Except, apparently, it was. Deep in the woods, on Halloween night, he?d stumbled onto a bundle of people in crazy costumes that were dancing around an altar or two made of wood and sticks, brambles and thorns, and worse. They?d had a woman already tied down there, her face bloody with scratches and her limbs as bruised as could be, one arm broken backwards and bent until her elbow was cracked and bleeding, her hand under her shoulder. After he?d finished puking at the sight, they?d caught him and tied him to the other altar. And now? ?GAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!? He screamed as they lashed one of the branches of thorns across him, the green brambles bending just enough to slice along his skin rather than digging in deeper. Every time that they swept the thorns across him, there were new lines of red left behind, sweeping across him and leaving him dripping through the remains of his shirt. ?Please, stop! STOP!? They ignored him, dancing around and screaming words that made no sense. Richard flailed, trying to pull himself free of the ropes they?d used, but they were too thick, too strong. His back was bleeding into the thorns below him, each blow, each squirm dragging him across the older, harder, sharper, thicker points. ?Let me go!? His screams had no more effect the second time than the first. Panting for breath as they danced and shouted, screamed and ranted to the heavens, Richard risked a look over at the woman again. He?d heard her name. They said it, or one of them did. He didn?t remember. Melody or something. She was bleeding from her neck, her face, everywhere. She must have been tortured with everything they?d used on him, and worse, for hours before he?d stumbled upon the scene. Her body? Her body wasn?t human. Not anymore. Another Wildtouched, he knew. Poor - ?GRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!? He screamed as they brought something else into the fray. Nettles, ivy, and creatures that crawled through the undergrowth. Enraged ants were let loose upon him, and spiders were prodded and poked until they bit at him, leaving him with bite marks and red spots all along his chest and his arms, down his belly as his shirt was pulled away. They drowned quickly in the flows of blood that poured from him, but the bite marks remained. Whimpering, panting, and trying to find the words that might make them let him go, Richard found himself changing. His own Wildtouched abilities, coming alive under stress, were already trying to bring him some safety. A bit of his skin knitted back together, soon covered by a small layer of down as feathers were growing over him - ?AAAAAAAAAAGH!? Only for it to be ripped away as one of the cruel cultists brought a rake down on his chest, pointy side down. It punched through his skin, bouncing off his ribs before it could go too deep. He felt the clang of the metal points digging in, felt the metal almost hook into his rib cage before pulling back. The cultists were laughing between their chants, the sound so far away and so dulled by the pounding of his heart in his ears. He felt the blood pouring through his feathers, matting them together, taking away any of the softness and comfort that they might have offered. He shook his head, clenching his teeth, trying to pull away from the pain - ?She is almost ready?? The cultists, they were talking about the woman. He turned, seeing her again. She was Wildtouched, alright, halfway to the form of a humanoid great horned owl. Her broken arm had become a broken wing, still bent back even as the muscle tried to knit itself together, even as the bone tried to reforge itself. It didn?t work. The cultists held it down, hacking at it every so often with knives when it was trying to attach itself together. Her face was half-human, half-bird, her nose and mouth molded together to form a beak. A beak that was bleeding as one of the cultists grabbed at it, digging around it with a knife - CRACK! The sound split the air as the woman?s face was broken apart, the upper half of her beak wrenched free of her face along with a great deal of flesh and bone. She screamed until the blood turned it to burbles, and Richard wretched in the back of his throat. God...god...I have to...have to get out of here? Even though it hurt, he dragged himself against the thorns at his back, feeling them clawing up his back like a hundred hunting cats, ripping his skin and feathers to pieces as he continued to transform under the stress. He pulled at his bindings, straining to pull himself free - ?AHHHHHHHH!? Only to scream as one of the thorns went deep enough to tap his spine. He felt the pain ripping through his body and, stupidly, he spasmed. RIIIP! The thorns were wedged between some of the disks of his spine, pressing right into the nerves. The pain grew a hundred times worse...and he couldn?t move. He literally could not move, even as the pain mounted a hundred times higher. Even as the feathers sprouted from his back, even as his legs thinned and his arms grew lighter, even as the restraints grew weaker from his new size, he could do nothing. He?d paralyzed himself trying to escape, and could only watch what was happening on the other altar just across the way. The woman was bleeding, only having half a face and one arm now. Her body had been mostly transformed, though she was as incapable of moving as he was. She laid there, staring up dumbly, barely alive. And then, the cultists reached down, bearing knives. ?The heart is prepared!? Richard heard the knives digging in, could almost feel it from the squelching, gutter-punching sound of the blades rooting through flesh and poking around bone. He heard the scrape of the metal against ribs, heard the cracking as the bones were pulled up. He couldn?t even look away as flesh was peeled off and the bones unfolded, forming too many white fingers reaching out of the woman?s chest. Blood spurted up, she screamed dully, and the head of the cultists reached in. When he pulled back with a grunt and a squelch, a slowly-dying heart was clutched between his fingers. Blood spurted from it once, twice before it stopped, and the woman on the altar...went still. Why? He knew why. The Wildtouched were filled with magic. It was what allowed them to transform in the first place. The worse-off they were, the more of that magic was present. And now...now Melody?s magic was in the hands of her killers, to be used and abused the way that they wanted. And soon, he would be no better off. They returned to him, carrying a hundred methods of torture in hand. Some brought scorpions, some carried fire. Some had knives, some carried clubs. One or two carried plants that looked as evil and twisted and hot as the worst flora of hell, and he knew...he knew that he was helpless to stop them. Even as his own beak started to grow in, his mouth and his nose melting together, his eyes becoming sharper, his body becoming lighter, there was no escape. Some of the cultists moved around, holding a barbed wire strand that they wrapped around his neck. They pulled. Tight. He gurgled as his air supply was cut off, his throat bleeding already, running along the feathers on his neck and down towards his lungs and his stomach. He couldn?t taste it, but he didn?t have to. He couldn?t even scream anymore as they tormented him, but he could feel every single pain. He felt it when they held torches to his feet, turning his talons from a tan color to blackened flesh. He felt it when they pulled open his mouth and forced the scorpions over his tongue, making them strike and pinch again and again and again, until he could feel his tongue decaying in rapid necrosis. And he felt it when the leader stabbed the knife into his chest the first time. No scream, no words, no movement. Richard was alive, but only barely. He couldn?t think, couldn?t breathe, couldn?t even scream. All he could do was watch and feel as the pain mounted one last time. Crack. Crack. Crack. There went his ribs. Wrench, snap, squish. There went his muscles. And then - POP. He had never felt his heart stop before. He never knew what it was like to be without any support for the blood in his veins. With that giant a hole in the system, all he could feel was the gush as the pressure failed, feeling everything draining into his chest, almost like he was going flat. His eyes dimmed as the cultist held his heart to the heavens, and soon, death, and blessed nothing, claimed his pained soul.