Why do the prisoners always run to the roof? After twelve years spent thwarting scores of misguided escape attempts, Talquet was really starting to wonder. More importantly, he thought, Why do I always bother running after them? As he hyperventilated, leaning against a rusted iron buttress, he was forced to consider the question of which party was in fact the stupider of the two. The burning sensation in his lungs told him that he wouldn’t like the answer.

At least the would-be escapees had their reasons. After all, as inadvisable as taking the roof was, trying to go out the front door was considerably more daunting. The castle antechamber had been fortified into an ad hoc convict processing center back when the place was originally retrofitted as a prison. Convicts usually only get to see it once during their tenure, but frankly, the sight of blindfolded basilisks being led around on leashes tends to make a strong enough impression the first time.

Red-faced and shaking, the bloated old guard decided it was time to start taking it easy. He heaved himself forward and began a bowlegged walk towards the ledge.

“I’m... out... of breath... that’s ten... lashes... I’m... sweating... ten more... My calves are... on fire... another ten! My thighs are really, really... chafing. I think I may just beat you... to death.”

He let the words echo against the crumbling mortar and back off the huge metal braces that ran all along the parapet.

“Unless... you come out... right now!”

Nothing.

In twelve years, nobody had ever taken him up on one of his offers. It was a shame, as he really didn’t enjoy handing out punishment. Sure, sometimes it seemed worth it. Sometimes when he hit them they would register every single blow. He could see it on their faces: they were sorry. They’d never do it again; until the next time, at least. They’d eat their stew and stop throwing waste between the bars. They’d do anything. Anything, [/i]really[/i]. Really, anything. If he would just stop.

Those ones weren’t so bad. The ones that got to him were those who just locked away each strike in some spiteful place behind their eyes. The trouble came from the ones who stayed quieter than a sculler and as still as if they’d taken a long gander into the big dead peepers of one of the basilisks downstairs. Those ones would only show the pain in their eyes. It was like they were storing it up. Each lash made their pupils go darker, until eventually they got so dark that you would swear that they made the candles in the dungeons dimmer. It was like they sucked all the light and heat from the room when they looked at you. Those were the ones that kept him up at night.

Talquet choked on another shallow breath as he reminded himself that the one he was chasing now had been one of those ones. The sweat on his forehead suddenly felt icy. He became aware of the fact that he was holding enough tension in his shoulders to string an elvish longbow.

He lifted his truncheon up in front of him, just in case. After twisting the pommel, his baton began seething to life. In moments it glowed a faint orange and moments after that it was already white hot. Officially, you weren’t supposed to turn the baton on unless you were defending your own life or quelling a riot, as it tended to leave scars on those you used it against. Unofficially, the guards had an unspoken agreement that riots were best quelled preemptively. Needless to say, there were plenty of scars on show.

As the baton hissed and steamed in protest against the fog rolling over the walls, Talquet chided himself for his cowardice. Nobody was prepared to deal with the truncheon, and it certainly wasn’t like the guy was going to escape. In twelve years, he’d never seen that.

For all the times he’d been up on this roof, he’d never seen anybody successfully get to the ground. Granted, some people had different parameters for success than he did. Those whose goal it was to reach the ground as quickly and forcefully as possible were seldom disappointed. That was one of three ways it usually went: splat, surrender, or fight. Surrender was of course the most common choice, but splat had the distinction of being the only option that yielded the result that the inmate set out to achieve. Talquet supposed that constituted some kind of success, at least in a place as bleak as this.

Only one soul had even come close to achieving the fourth option, which was of course escape. The particular rarity of this occurrence was such that the waddling guard never even bothered to consider the possibility anymore. The sap that nearly did it was the gauntest vedalken you’d ever hope to see. She had made it to the western ledge, where she summoned a pair of blue gossamer wings that tentatively appeared on her back, only to flit out of existence again and again. It took several seconds of labored casting to solidify the phantasmagorical appendages. Once they were really and truly present, she hunched over to vomit some blood before leaping from the roof like it was an afterthought.

Although difficult, it certainly was not impossible to cast magic within prison walls. It was not even technically forbidden. The only caveat was that summoning mana should be done at one’s own risk, since to do so would be to invite incredible pain from the standard-issue leech collar attached to the neck of every inmate. Such devices were ingenious. Since spellcasting is essentially an exercise in exerting one’s will, it is a practice that is particularly vulnerable to forces that specialize in breaking the will, or really, even just breaking concentration.

The pain from the leech collar provided enough of a deterrent to thwart most mages, although pyromancers and other hot-tempered spellcasters had proven difficult to stymie in the past. If anything, the rage fueled by the excruciating pain of the collar often augmented the potency of their spells.

A solution to this problem had been found only recently, in the form of an auxiliary enchantment that caused the wearer of each collar to experience a sensation of debilitating confusion should he or she try to cast any magic. This effect would become cumulative as the wearer tried to summon more mana, requiring ever more mental upkeep the longer the mage tried to cast. Eventually, the spellcaster would forget what it was he or she was attempting to do, and the accumulated mana would be leeched away and used to power the pain enchantment. One test subject had described the experience as being similar to trying to remember the circumstances of a dream, except that in this case, the act of trying to remember caused you to feel like you were jamming a knife into your own spine.

Thanks to revisions inspired by the exploits of the winged vedalken and the contributions the various pyromancers over the years, the system as it currently stood was essentially foolproof, except for one minor weakness; each leech collar could only drain a limited amount of mana at one time. Theoretically, the collars had a threshold of efficacy, beyond which they would no longer have any effect. Although, to pass that threshold and overload the device would require a force of will and an ability to draw mana that Talquet had certainly never seen.

The mana-siphoning principle at work behind the technology of the leech collars was also utilized, on a far more audacious scale, by the prison’s other set of magical defenses, which was an invisible barrier that ran along the circumference of the outer walls, like an energy-sapping vampiric moat.

It had been this obstacle that had foiled the otherwise-impressive escape attempt of the emaciated vedalken many years prior. Talquet forever had the image of those moments etched into his consciousness. He could still see her blue skin, which seemed nearly white under the light of the horizon she was flying towards. At the zenith of her progress, the radiant sun behind her surrounded her head in a halo-like corona of light that made her look like some avenging angel in a child’s story. Yet, at that moment of triumph, her shimmering wings were cruelly plucked off of her back and out of existence. Although the impact itself was obscured by the partition formed by the outer walls, the thud rang as clearly now in his remembrance as it had on the day of the event.

The harshest irony of that moment was that, had she not flown quite so high, she quite possibly would have survived, and might have even escaped. The walls themselves, being no more than twenty feet high, would certainly have left her worse for the wear, but she might have lived to tell the tale. Judging by her obvious magical ability and absurd tolerance for pain, she might even have been able to rustle up one more bit of magic to set her on her way.

Talquet snapped himself back into the present; this was certainly not the time to be dwelling on old thoughts of dead vedalkens. Although it was an otherwise flat, open rooftop, there were several alcoves that he needed to check, which were located between the buttresses. These supports braced the conical spire jutting from the center of the roof. Each buttress provided ample obscuration, as each had to be necessarily monolithic in order to support the crumbling mortar of the tower.

As Talquet rounded the spire, checking each potential hiding place, he found himself unable to shake the image of the vedalken woman’s face from his mind. Despite the task at hand, his thoughts kept drifting back to her. Annoyed, he forced himself to keep swatting the thought away. Why couldn’t he think of something else? It was as if someone was shoving a mental picture in front of him whilst holding his mind’s eyelids open. Despite the severity of the distraction, he chalked it up to simple fatigue and attempted to shock himself back into focus. When slapping and pinching failed to return him to wakefulness, he turned to more drastic measures, gingerly touching the tip of his finger against his blistering baton.

“Owwwwwww!!!”

The immediacy of the unbearable pain instantly restored clarity to the world. Towards the end of his keening wail he noticed that the shriek had a strangely resonant quality, as if two voices were harmonizing the most unpleasant note the Multiverse had ever produced. As his scream tapered off, he became aware that what he had heard was in fact two distinct voices yelling in unison. The implication of this discovery rolled over him in a wave of angry recognition. The other scream, he realized, was the same one that he had heard the moment before discovering the broken collar and open cell door that had led him up here.

“You’ve been in my Mind!”

Without pausing to elaborate further, he sprinted a quarter of the way around the spire to where the twin scream had sounded. As he rounded the corner of the buttress, he brought his truncheon down upon the place where he instinctively knew his opponent was; except that he wasn’t.

Nothing. Once again.

Seething with anger and confusion, Talquet stood panting in the fog for several seconds. The mist was impenetrably thick here, and it occurred to him that his foe might simply have slunk farther back into the recess, so he began frantically waving the truncheon in wide arcs around him. His berserk floundering was suddenly interrupted by an unexpectedly ethereal voice coming from behind him:

“Hey there! Talquet, sweetie! I’m over here.”

Turning, he found himself confronted by an uncannily familiar vedalken face, framed by the sun.

“Impossible.”

The scene was nearly exactly as he remembered it, except also somehow fundamentally different. Standing on the precipice as she had all those years before, the rail-thin mage closed her eyes, suddenly sprouting a luminous set of wings on her back. Yet, instead of doubling over to vomit as she had done the first time, she simply turned her head and spat a small globule of blood onto the tiles. She maintained eye contact and slight smirk all the while, in a manner that Talquet understood was meant to be more vindictive than defiant. She then turned, hopping gracefully onto the balustrade before looking back at him. She flashed a broad smile in Talquet’s direction, showing the blood on her teeth, and then simply glided off into the sun.

As soon as her feet left the railing, the lumbering guard ran to where she had been the moment before and stood there, watching her fateful trajectory. Her flight played out exactly as it had the first time around, complete with the overreaching ascent towards the sun.

Yet this time, instead of plummeting like a comet, she froze in midair, before instantaneously winking out of existence completely.

Dumbstruck, Talquet was left staring into the sun. It was a sun that, he suddenly realized, had very little business being in the sky. Hadn’t it been dreary and overcast a moment ago? In confirmation of this suspicion, he suddenly felt a damp, pillowy pressure against his shoulder, as if the fogbank behind him had grown a finger and was poking it into his back.

It was at this moment that he understood the illusory nature of the vision he had just seen. His already pink face grew even more flustered as he recognized that he had been played once again. Performing a violent about-face towards his unseen adversary, he arced his truncheon through yielding vapor, which then slowly coalesced into human form.

Talquet found himself being stared down by a set of jet-black eyes embedded in a sunken, smiling face. The escapee plucked the truncheon from his hand and held it inches away from Talquet’s throat.

Talquet, however, did not notice that he had been disarmed, as he was too busy staring into those abyssal sockets, in which he saw his own tortured reflection. As if he were staring into some inky scrying pool, he saw his form as he feared it would look mere moments from now. Needless to say, there were plenty of scars on show.