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.

Kaeden sat up with the tail end of the nightmare, the scream that he had later realized was his own still echoing in his mind.

The sheets pooling around his waist as he raked his hands through his thick hair, he wondered when the memories would leave him alone.

It was then that he heard a rustling outside his door.

Nostrils flaring, he slipped into a loose pair of pants and retrieved the sword that he kept near him.

Making his way along the wall to the door and reached to open it even as the man on the other side knocked.

Kaeden jerked the door open, sword at the ready, and snarled, “Who the hell are you?” at where he thought the person might have been standing.

Jess smiled at the other man’s reaction, thinking he would have had a similar one.

“Lukasz sent me,” he said.

“Why would he do that,” Kaeden continued to snarl.

“He thought I might be able to help with your nightmares, General,” Jess answered.

“He did, did he?” Kaeden said in a quiet voice. “Is that the reason the whelp didn’t show up with you? Never mind, I can guess the answer to that one. It still doesn’t answer the question of who you are.”

“Jess Phoenix,” he answered and grinned slightly at Kaeden’s sharply indrawn breath.

Reluctantly opening the door wider, though still keeping the sword close to him, Kaeden said, “I suppose you can come in.”

Jess stepped inside with a “He also let me know of your ability to see through the touch of another.”

If Kaeden could have used his eyes, Jess was sure he would have seen a fire strong enough to burn steel to cinders.

“The boy goes too far.”

“Maybe,” Jess said noncommittally. “He does so because he cares. Since it looks like you’ve heard of me, you know that it won’t be any easier on me – your emotions, and the memories associated with them, are too close to the surface for you – do you think I need any more of that kind of baggage?”

Thinking for a minute or two, Kaeden carefully made his way to a chest and brought out a hand-held mirror.

“I don’t know why I trust you, but I do,” said the recalcitrant general. “Hold this in front of your face.”

Jess did as asked and let the general touch him.

When he did, Jess’s knees almost buckled at the memories and emotions that swamped him, even with the shields he tried to hold up.

Even so, he kept his face impassive so that the general could look his fill.

After Kaeden let him go, Jess sat down heavily in a chair while Kaeden made his way back to his bed.

Looking up at Kaeden, Jess asked, “Will you let me ease your rest, even for a little while?”

Rubbing his hands over his face, Kaeden pondered it for a bit.

“I’ve had these nightmares for years,” he said wearily. “What makes you think you’ll be able to ease them?”

“Nothing at all,” Jess answered, not knowing what made him push. “Will you at least let me try?”

“Yes,” Kaeden said in a nearly unheard whisper, laying down.

Drawing a chair nearer the bed, Jess laid his hands on Kaeden’s shoulders, feeling the muscles spasm and keeping a check on his own temper at what the man had suffered.

As he disintegrated into a mist and reformed within Kaeden, Jess thought of the memories that were now a part of him – the feel of the whip across legs that weren’t his and yet were, the burning fire that coursed through “his” body from each stinging lash that crossed the line from pleasure to excruciating pain, the jolting pain each time a strained muscle or a broken limb moved each tiny bit, the sickly sweet smell of burning flesh as hot irons were laid across “his” feet, the emotional wasteland at seeing his wife and daughters raped, and the final indignity and pain of having his eyes burned out.

Jess stayed within Kaeden’s body as he wove a healing sleep into the man’s psyche for as short a time as possible, knowing that the man didn’t like the feeling of having two full sized bodies within one skin.

After he left the Thracian’s body, Jess, exhausted, reformed back in the seat next to Kaeden’s bed and sat there, keeping watch until the dawn came.