Prison Princess

I sucked in my breath. What had caught his attention?
Without warning or pause, he grabbed my arm and threw us both to the ground, covering me with his body. The night lit up like sunlight. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, moving from moderate pain to a burning, scalding sensation like I’d touched a stove and rolled around on it with my whole body.
“Sun bomb,” he whispered in my ear. “Don’t say a word. Not a fucking word. It’s meant to draw us out in pain. Ignore the pain. You can do that. We all can if we just try. It’s an old trick. Almost insulting that they’re using it.”
I was surprised he could even speak still. I couldn’t even think past this pain. Had he been conditioned to ignore it?
Burning continued to assault my skin. It was like being licked by flames. A tiny whimper escaped my lips, and Cypress huffed before placing his hand over my mouth. Tears burned my eyes, and I squirmed under his hard body, seeking some sort of relief from the painful intensity of their sun bomb. Who was doing this?
I drew my focus to Cypress, who didn’t seem bothered by the pain. He basked in light above me, so he had to be tortured even more than I was. But his eyes didn’t flare. His teeth weren’t clenched. He didn’t shake or moan. He was still as a statue, and the reality of his severe presence suddenly hit me. He wasn’t affected by pain. What kind of person didn’t feel...this? He wasn’t immune, I knew that in my gut. He wasn’t immune, I knew that in my gut, though I couldn’t have said why. But I’d learned to trust my instincts over the years.
“Focus on me, Princess,” he whispered. The pain grew and grew and grew. I clutched at his chest and buried my face in his neck, using his skin to block the screams threatening to break past my teeth. Embarrassment at being so close to this heartless man was terrible, but there was too much physical pain to really focus on that. “It’s almost done. About ten more seconds.”
I wet his skin with my tears and curled my toes. My breathing grew harsh. My lip quivered against his neck. Time was a passing concept back at Nightmare Penitentiary. But here? It was pure torture. I never knew how much power ten seconds could have. Weakness and exhaustion rode me hard.
And then as quickly as the agony appeared, it vanished. I let out a gasp of relief, and slowly each of my muscles relaxed. I still held onto Cypress as I acclimated to the lack of pain. The tingling sensation of the moon took over, casting a cooling effect on my exposed skin. I wanted to strip naked and bathe in its calming effects. “You can let go now,” Cypress grunted. I quickly released my hold on him and shuffled out from under his hard body.
“Who did that?” I croaked.
“Be quiet!”
I snapped my mouth shut as Cypress crawled through the field and looked out over the dark. We were out in the open, and anyone could have gotten to us. We had no trees to cover us, and even though it was dark, the bright light of the sun bomb could expose us if they tossed another one our way. “We need to get to the forest,” Cypress hissed while nodding behind him. “They’re getting closer,” he then said.
I tried to see what he could see, but there was nothing there. “Who is getting closer?” I asked. Cypress dug around in his pack, momentarily distracted. I decided to ask him again and risk his anger. “Who is getting closer, Cypress?”
A low laugh responded. “We are, Princess.”
I had one moment to see that Cypress rolled his eyes before he flipped over and waved his hand at the strangers. For a second it was like their bodies stretched, altered, their eyes bulging out like they weren’t real, as though they were somehow other than they were. They almost seemed to melt.
I rubbed my eyes. How was this possible? Cypress grabbed my arms. “Come on. Some of them will survive that. The worthy ones.”
Some of them wouldn’t? I didn’t get to dwell on that for very long because we were transported suddenly. The way we had earlier, appearing this time in the middle of trees. Cypress put a finger to his lips as I righted myself. We still couldn’t make noise? Hadn’t we just...gotten to safety?
Although shadows kept blurring my eyes, I could see in the not too far distance, a grassy field. Was that the one we’d just left or another one? If that was the case, then I guessed we hadn’t gone far. I didn’t understand. Why wasn’t he taking us away?
“Find them,” someone shouted. “Now.”
The voice that taunted us earlier bellowed those orders, and within seconds, a man appeared in front of us. He was tall, with dark hair that was stringy in the way hair looked when it wasn’t washed. We all looked like that in prison sometimes. Being clean was a privilege, not a right. When he smiled at me, he had two teeth. Total.
With a wave of his hand, he surged wind at me before a rope appeared out of nowhere, knotting and wrapping in the air. I gasped. What was he going to do with…
Cypress jumped in front of me, uttering words I didn’t understand. But it didn’t seem to matter. The rope wrapped around his neck.
“Not who I wanted. But that’s fine,” the toothless man said. Cypress was pulled backward by the magic rope. He banged into a tree, sending shards of bark flying everywhere. The rope tightened more and more and more. My rescuer, who seemed to hate me, struggled as the magic rope strangled him second by second.
I gasped. No! I had to do something. I had to...I didn’t know what. I couldn’t let him die.
But how would I save him? I was nothing. A Druid,