Three days. Three endless, agonizing days bled into one another until time lost all meaning.
Daylight would blind her, only for the suffocating dark of night to take its place.
The constant plip-plop of her life force draining into the iron buckets became the ticking clock of her own demise.
By the third day, Eiravyne had reached a brutal, hollow state.
Her skin was a ghostly, translucent white, her lips cracked and bleeding, and her bones arched sharply beneath her ruined silk gown.
She was entirely emptied out. Her heart beat in a faint, stuttering rhythm, until finally, the darkness swallowed her completely, and her mind shut down to escape the torment.
When her eyes flickered open again, the serene, sunlit prison was gone.
Instead, a thick, acrid cloud of gray smoke rolled across the ceiling, stinging her eyes and burning the back of her raw throat.
She choked, a weak, pathetic wheeze escaping her chest.
Something was deeply, violently wrong.
