Kyle did not remember how he got to the middle of the room.
He had been propped against the cratered drywall like a broken doll, held up only by Phei's fist in his dressing gown and the quiet promise of more to come.
An yet, right now, he was floating — suspended in the exact centre of the room at perfect eye level with his tormentor, limbs wrenched into a perfect, obscene X by four long, living tendrils of black-and-violet Void-Ice that had grown straight out of floor, ceiling, and walls like the room itself had decided to devour him.
The Void-Ice chains did not feel like metal.
They felt like the absence of everything good in the universe wearing the cruel shape of restraints... a cold so absolute it had burned straight past pain, past numbness, and into a soul-deep wrongness that made his bones scream inside his flesh.
