They struck her.
With whips and with bows, with fists and feet. Over and over again, day after day. After day. Until blood streamed down her delicate face, gashes adorned that perfect body. Screaming at her with words she could understand, yelling at her.
Telling her she was weak, that she was defective. Yelling that their experiment was a waste of time. She could feel the anger in each lash, the rage behind every bone-shattering blow. She bled on the outside while those words cut her deep within. And that fragile self, newborn to the world in more than just name, bore the abuse silently.
It must have been some obscure aspect of the manner of her birth, then, that the pain and the anger took hold of, shaped with cruel hands fed by the cruelty of the Master. The Master who had given her life, but seemed to consider her less a being with her own agency, her own self. More as if she were a tool devoid of independent thought, of a sense of self.
Rage. Building. Building. Subsuming everything.
---
There might not have been the truly vile stench of decay down this corridor, but the filth in the air here was still unpleasant. More bones, still bearing a little flesh, lay in this long corridor. Motes of writhing white adorned what little there was left here, the decay was not as overpowering as back the other way.
Doors leading to either side. Some were ajar, and while most were empty - a dining hall, table overturned, spilled food on the floor; a room with some beds in it, neatly made, clothes hung on racks in an alcove cut into the rock at the back of the room; a room with a kettle full of scummy water, suspended over cold ashes with long wooden handle sticking out of it, and a pile of clothes on the ground beside it - not all were empty.
A room, a half eaten body leaving its stink to cloy in the air, leaning against st a wall,one leg bent at a strange angle with jagged shard stabbing through corpulent black flesh. Another with a body literally torn in half, lower torso laying in the middle of the floor amid black, dry blood. The upper half lay on top of a counter with a variety of broken glassware in odd shapes and sizes.
And, in a room towards the end, the tall, lithe woman curled into a quivering ball, tears staining her cheeks. "Do not hurt, please do not hurt, do not hurt
Mara, please please do not.." she whispered, voice plaintive and hitching with the tears she said. It was like a litany against evil, and she repeated it over and over, up and backing into a corner, wrapping her arms around her knees and rocking back and forth. Never ceasing the litany.