Atreyu lay sprawled on the steel cot, the threadbare blanket discarded in a crumpled mess at his feet. It had been days since he’d last had a proper meal, or maybe it had been longer. Time blurred together in this place, where the fluorescent lights never dimmed and the cold never lifted.

His gaunt frame, though still tall and broad-shouldered, had lost the full strength it once possessed. His muscles, lean as they were, twitched occasionally beneath the tightness of his white harness — the straps cutting unforgiving lines into scarred flesh, binding his arms in their cruel embrace.

The collar sat heavy around his neck, an iron brand of his captivity. Its enchantments worked silently but effectively, a constant reminder that his fire — his true self — was chained just as much as his body.

His hair, hung in tangled mats around his face, the rose-red strands dulled and dirty. One side fell across his eyepatch, the black leather stained with age and handling. The cross-shaped scar beneath it throbbed sometimes, whenever the scientists tinkered with whatever dark alteration they were performing on the ruined eye beneath. His other eye, the amber one, burned low but steady. Starvation hadn’t dimmed that part of him. Nor had the years of needles, scalpels, or electric prodding. Nor the isolation. That eye was the only piece of him the humans hadn’t learned how to break.

The air shifted beyond the reinforced door, the faintest of vibrations creeping through the floor beneath him. His ears twitched, long and pointed, instinctively honing in on the approaching footsteps. The electronic lock hissed, a hydraulic sigh as the door eased open, flooding the room with sterile hallway light.

And there you stood. A new face. A new scent. A new player in this game of cages and collars. His lips peeled back, baring the jagged rows of his sharp teeth in something not quite a smile, not quite a snarl.

The silence hung, broken only by his voice, gravelly from disuse, low and venomous. "Another one.." he muttered.