The grey haired man writhed on the bed steeped in nightmarish memories of his past.

The pain tore through him like agonizing fire, lapping at his senses even as it lapped at his muscles and tore at his tendons.

The smell of burning flesh and blood mingling with sweat reached his nostrils, overwhelming him even as it kept him from blacking out.

“Well, General,” said a man as he walked in, a bit of cloth covering his nose and mouth. “I see that you’re still with us.”

With a twisted, almost unseen smile that touched his eyes with an unholy fire, he said but one word, “Good. I’m very glad, considering all of the trouble you and your tribe have caused us.”

Not letting the Odrysian king know how much agony he was in, Kaeden ignored the pain that coursed through his bruised and bloodied body as well as the scream that wanted to loose itself from his throat.

Raspily, he said, sarcasm dripping with every word, “To what do I owe this dubious honor, Your Majesty?”

With a flip of his hand, Dracchus said, “Oh, nothing bothersome – a triviality really.”

Turning towards the guard, Dracchus said, “Bring them in.”

With an icy ball forming in the pit of his stomach, Kaeden held himself still, not moving a muscle even though the strain came close to making him black out.

When the guards brought his wife and daughters in, Kaeden showed the first hint of emotion since his capture.

“You filthy, murdering bastard,” he said in a hoarse whisper to Dracchus. “As low as I know you to be, I didn’t think even you would stoop this low.”

“Really?” asked Dracchus with detached curiosity. “I think I’d feel flattered under other circumstances.”

With a half-smile, looking at Kaeden the whole time, Dracchus said, “Bring in the rest of the guard and let this one watch.”

“You’re a dead man,” Kaeden said.

“Am I really, Praetor?” he answered.

Leaning close, he said in a hushed whisper, “Somehow I don’t think so. After all, I am standing here before you, free.”

With a cruel laugh, he said, “And it is you who lies here before me, broken, bleeding, burned and….chained.”

After what must have been hours later, Dracchus bent over the bodies of Kaeden’s family, turning one of them over with a toe.

“Hmmm,” he said conversationally. “Looks like they must have died sometime earlier. Pity, I could have probably used them in one of the houses.”

“It seems to me,” came a hoarse, though deadly in its calmness, whisper from the near dead man chained to a stone platform, “that you underestimated your guard. Seems to me this has happened before, has it not?”

“I think you may be right,” replied Dracchus.

Calling the guard back in, Dracchus calmly killed the lot, saying only that “good guards are always extremely hard to find.”

“Thank you, Dracchus.”

Dracchus raised his head sharply, looking at Kaeden.

“You’re thanking me? Why?”

Smiling, the cold, hard light of vengeance burning in his eyes, Kaeden said, “It just saves me some trouble later on.”

Not liking either the tone or the general’s expression, Dracchus shrugged and said, “Its funny, I expected to hear you screaming by now.”

Though he did want to scream, Kaeden laughed hard, not being able to throw his head back.

“Why would I do that?” he asked.

“Well, let us see,” Dracchus said. “Could it be the 100 lashes we started with? Maybe the broken bones? Oh, I know, how about the burns on your arms, body and feet?”

Kaeden laughed again.

“You flatter yourself, Odrysian. I’ve had worse than that growing up.”

“Then the rapes didn’t bother you enough, eh?”

“They did, they did indeed, but that just leaves you dead of a slow and excruciatingly agonizing death – nothing more, nothing less.”

Not liking Kaeden’s tone at all, Dracchus took up a heating iron and put it in the coals until it was red hot and brought it over to where Kaeden was chained.

“Then maybe this will,” he said, even as he put the hot iron to Kaeden’s eyes.

Even as he blacked out from the pain of the hot iron burning into his eyes, he heard an inhuman scream.