Chapter 3: The Pedagogic Press
The assembled court drew closer, a semicircle of tilted heads and gleaming eyes. Their forms were a catalogue of nightmares—a creature of fused, weeping hands; a elegant figure with a mouth stretching across its torso; a thing that was all elegant, bony spines and too many knees. They watched you with the vacant, hungry interest of crows watching a wounded animal.
Virdiana ignored them, her attention a laser on you. That small flame of defiance in your chest felt foolish now, a match against a volcano. But you kept your gaze on her, even as your knees trembled.
“You see,” she said, her voice carrying effortlessly in the humming chamber, “the body is just a provisional shell. Fragile. The soul inside… that’s the interesting bit. It’s like mercury. You try to grip it, it squirms away. You apply heat, it expands. You apply pressure,” she paused, her yellow eyes flickering with amusement, “it simply waits for the press to lift, and reforms.”
She took a step towards you. You flinched, and a titter ran through the courtiers. A sound like crickets and breaking glass.
“Don’t worry,” she said, her tone almost kindly. “Crushing is… blunt. Useful for making a point, but a bit pedestrian for a sustained study.” She held up her hand, peering at her perfect crimson nails. “Today, let’s test your regeneration. The precision of it.”
A cold dread, deeper than before, pooled in your stomach. This wasn’t about overwhelming force. This was about curiosity. A vivisection performed by a smiling god.
Your vision swam again, that inward plummeting sensation. But this time, it didn’t stop at cockroach.
You were smaller. Much smaller. A glistening black ant, scurrying on the vast, rocky plain of a bone fragment. The world was a symphony of colossal sounds: the rustle of Virdiana’s corset was like a distant forest fire; her breath was a tropical gale.
A shadow fell over you. Two pillars of fire-red flesh descended, pinching the space around you. Her fingers. They didn’t grab. They suspended you, lifted you into the dizzying air until you dangled before her gigantic, golden eye. The scrutiny was absolute.
“‘Let’s test your regeneration,’” she murmured, her voice a mountain speaking.
She turned her hand and dropped you.
It was a long fall. You tumbled, end over end, striking the hard landscape of a rib bone with a force that should have shattered you. Your exoskeleton held, but a hairline crack seared across your perception. Pain, sharp and electric.
Before you could orient your six legs, the world went dark. Not with shadow, but with a vast, leather ceiling. The sole of her boot.
It didn’t stamp. It settled.
The pressure was immense, but not instantly fatal. It pinned you, a uniform, smothering weight. You were trapped in a microscopic space, the tread of her boot like the topography of a prison.
Then, slowly, she began to drag you backwards.
The friction was agony. Your tiny claws scrabbled against the smooth bone, finding no purchase. The world jerked and shuddered. You felt a leg, one of your six, catch. A sickening tension. A pop, so faint it was more a feeling than a sound. A limb was gone. A line of white-hot fire traced where it had been.
She kept dragging.
Another pop. Another line of fire. She was reeling you in, peeling your parts off like the legs of a cooked prawn.
“‘This is what happens to insects,’” her voice boomed from somewhere high above, conversational, didactic, ““who think they’re worthy of anything but soles. You see? It’s not personal. It’s taxonomy. You are, by design, a thing to be beneath.””
Pop. Another leg severed. The phantom pain of the missing limbs was a constellation of suffering. You tried to scream. No sound came from your ant-form. Instead, the air around you vibrated, a silent, ultrasonic shriek of pure terror that made the watching demons lean in, sniffing the air as if they could taste it.
Pop. Pop.
She had dragged you nearly to the edge of her sole. Only your front segments, your head and thorax, remained. The sensation was one of total, gradual annihilation. You weren’t being killed; you were being meticulously taken apart.
She stopped.
The pressure lifted. You were a broken, twitching thing on the bone mosaic, five of your six limbs gone, your antennae shredded.
“Fascinating,” Virdiana mused, crouching down. “The consciousness remains anchored until nearly the very end. You feel all of it, don’t you? The individual unmaking.” She tilted her head. “Mercy, then. A control for the experiment.”
Her boot lifted, a monumental cliff of black leather rising into the sky. It hovered for a moment, blotting out the cursed candlelight.
It descended.
A final, decisive stomp. A wet, concise finality.
Blackness.
Then, light. Air flooding into human lungs. You convulsed on the floor, whole limbs screaming with the memory of being absent. You gasped, curled into a fetal position on the cold bone shards. The silent vibrations of your insect-screams were still echoing in your human nerves.
A slow, approving applause rippled through the court. Not loud. A patter of claps, clicks, and slithers.
Virdiana stood over you, wiping the sole of her boot on the hem of a nearby demon’s robe—the one made of weeping hands. The hands flinched but stayed still. “See?” she said to her audience. “The reconstruction is instantaneous. The trauma, however,” she gestured at your shaking form, “lingers. Beautiful.”
She knelt beside you, her voice dropping to a whisper meant only for you. “You held onto ‘you’ through all of that. That spark. That’s what I’m looking for.” She reached out and brushed a strand of sweat-soaked hair from your forehead. Her touch was terrifyingly gentle. “Every time I grind it down, it comes back. A little dimmer, perhaps. But it’s there.” She leaned closer, her breath smelling of smoke and ozone. “We’re going to find its source. And then we’re going to see if it can be… extracted.”
She stood, addressing the court. “Dismissed. The show is over for now.”
The demons melted back into the shadows, their disappointed murmurs fading into the hum of the walls.
You were alone with her again. The vast, agonized chamber felt smaller, a personal torture cell. She walked back to her obsidian throne and sat, crossing her legs, studying you as you struggled to control your breathing.
“Get up,” she said, no malice in her voice now, only simple command. “You’re not permitted to languish. The body heals. The mind must follow.” She rested her chin on her fist. “Tell me, what lesson did you learn just now?”
You pushed yourself up onto your elbows, every muscle protesting. Your voice, when it came, was a shattered rasp. “That you’re… bored.”
She blinked. Then she threw her head back and laughed, a rich, genuine sound that echoed through the Hall of Fractured Forms. It was the most frightening sound you’d heard yet.
“Oh,” she said, wiping a non-existent tear from her eye. “Oh, that’s good. That’s very good.” Her smile settled into something predatory and pleased. “Perhaps you’re not just material. Perhaps you’re a conversation.” She leaned forward, her yellow eyes alight. “And I do so love a good talk.”