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Once, there was a girl locked in the kingdom fortressed by the Wall. The Wall repelled magic and monsters so the people could live there safely. But it was also the same wall where she had a great fall. She was once a happy girl. But when she woke up from the fall, she was changed. She woke up with a deep sorrow, a yearning she didn’t understand, and a fire, this pain in her veins that never dampened.

She didn’t take well to the Shroud. The chains were heavy and restrictive. The bars dug in at awkward angles when she slept, and she woke with an ache that never seemed to dull. Her head sagged with the weight of it, and the Grand Prioress would snap at her to hold her head straight. The Shrouded are meant to be seen and not heard. The Shrouded are meant to be good, obedient, demure, weak, submissive, and yielding.

She was not good. She was too loud, too argumentative, too hostile. At first, they didn’t understand her emotions bubbled to the surface because the fire was boiling them below.

It only took one week to receive her first whipping. She shattered a glass at dinner. They wouldn’t believe her then that it hadn’t really been her, rather this thing inside of her. She’d never had a whipping before, although Matron Sybil had threatened them often. She was too soft-hearted to follow through. The Grand Prioress and the Priest were not soft-hearted. That’s when the dāemon first revealed itself to them as her anger flourished with every swat of the whip against her bare back. The dāemon shot out and splintered the walls.

They recognized it for what it was immediately. It was her bad behavior, of course, that left a gaping vulnerability in her soul and the dāemon had worked its way in. If she weren’t a princess, they said she’d have gone straight to the ground, but the execution of one of the shrouded, especially a princess, would be too detrimental to the kingdom's morale.

They would rid her of it.

That first whipping didn’t tame her. Nor the second or the third. It made her angry. It made the fire blazing in her they called the dāemon worse.

They beat her until the dāemon unleashed. They locked her in chambers for days with no food or water in an attempt to starve it out. They made her recite and write lines and prayers that would purify her of its taint. They tried to drown it out, and they tried to smoke it out.

“Vile, corrupt soul that would allow the dāemon to fester!” They spat at her. “You must renounce and plead the Lord’s forgiveness to cleanse yourself of the sin.”

It only took two more weeks for them to extinguish the fire. Not the fire of the dāemon but the fire of her spirit. They effectively tamed her. If she had only been good like Syra the dāemon would never have been able to embed itself in her.

She was the Shrouded’s best-kept secret. The public certainly couldn’t know one of the Shrouded, the most righteous of their kingdom, was as tainted as she. But even though it went unspoken, the rest of the Shrouded all knew. They kept their distance as if the dāemon might break from her and latch onto them if they got too close. For the first time in their lives, a distance formed between the two sisters as Syra tried to maintain her new friendships with the rest of the Shrouded.

After weeks with no progress in removing it from her, they came for her at night. There was only one thing left then. She knew where they were taking her as soon as they slipped out the doors to the House of Shroud. She didn’t fight them, but her hands trembled, and her breaths came in sharp gusts. She didn’t even get to say goodbye. The burial of one of the Shrouded was usually a communal affair. They must really not want the public to know of the dāemon as it was just her, the Priest, and the Grand Prioress.

They walked in silence out to the Pits, where evil goes to die, by the old theurgynate mines. The Priest lowered her into the hole with an old rope. The panic didn’t hit her until she was there, surrounded by damp soil below her and all around her, and then survival instincts that had been deadened under weeks of torture came flaring up in her in a fury.

“Wait! Please! W-we can get rid of it. I know we can. I—I’ll be better. I’ll be better! PLEASE,” she shrieked. She clawed at the dirt, trying to climb the narrow walls, but the soggy soil merely crumbled in her hands.

They left. No parting words, no final prayers for her soul. The dāemon was unusually quiet in that dark, sullen place. There was only light for a few hours around midday. The rest of her time was spent in the darkness and the dirt. She waited for death to take her. But dying wasn’t easy. It felt like it would never come.

But then, on the third day, they returned. She was so weak she could barely hold her weight up as they tugged her out, and she collapsed on the ground, weeping and trembling. Another ruse in an attempt to rid her of the dāemon.

She returned to the House of Shroud, and they allowed her to eat and bathe. One night free of punishment before they would see if their efforts had been fruitful on the morrow.

She didn’t know how Syra managed to talk the guards into letting her into her chambers. But when Syra entered, Pandora merely looked away. She was hollow. She felt bitter toward Syra, who’d become distant with her since the discovery of her predilection. A part of her wished they’d never come to get her out.

Syra lifted the chains to study her gaunt face, and then she scrutinized the scratches on her hands, pulling up the sleeves of her robe to find the marks around her wrists. “They’re going to kill you, Pandora,” she said frantically, tears gathering in her eyes.

Pandora jerked her hand from Syra’s grip. “What do you care? You have new friends.”

“Of course I care!” Syra all but snarled, her fingers digging into Pandora’s shoulders. “Of course I care!” She shook Pandora vigorously and managed to shake Pandora from the bitter depths of despair and numbness she’d fallen into, and then they were both crying and embracing each other. “Do you think they’ve gotten rid of it this time?”

Pandora weakly shook her head, but Syra’s eyes were darting around the chambers, calculating. “Tell them it worked,” she pleaded.

“You want me to… lie to them?” Pandora asked in surprise that her perfect sister would suggest that kind of behavior.

“Yes, lie to them! Tell them it’s gone. They cured you of it.”

“They’ll know. They’ll see it.”

“Can’t you hold it back? Hold onto it.”

Pandora’s eyes widened, and she shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Try!”

“I’m corrupt, Syra.”

“I don’t care! I don’t care if you have a dāemon. I want you to live. I want them to quit torturing you,” she cried. “Promise me you’ll try. Try Pandora. You hold it. You hold it. You hold it. Hold it until they turn their cheek. Do it for me. I can’t live without you.”

“I’ll try.”

“If it works don’t you ever tell anyone the truth again. Never, ever. Promise me!” she said, shaking her shoulders.

“I promise.”

The next morning, when the Priest and the Grand Prioress came for her, she told them, “I think it’s gone. In the Pits, I felt it all of a sudden go out of me…and I haven’t felt it since.”

“You’re sure?” The Grand Prioress asked, suspicion lining her face.

She nodded. But of course, they wouldn’t merely take her at her word. They’d put it to the test.

Test it they did. Somehow, even during the pain she held it. The dāemon was still roiling as they walked her back to her chambers. As soon as she heard the sounds of their retreating footsteps, she used her full weight to move the heavy wooden bed frame. She let the dāemon finally unleash, cracking the wooden floor. She pushed the bed back to cover it. But, of course, it wasn’t over. They came for her the next day, too, to be certain. And the day after that and the day after that.

The whip lurches forward with a frightening crack. Her body buckles and re-steels itself under the force. She grits her teeth, the swats coming in sharp stings that fade out into an even worse icy burning. But the stings are nothing to the pain thundering inside of her, bending her in half, contorting her limbs. A strangled groan escapes through her teeth as the dāemon rises.

Hold it.

Crack.

Hold it.

Crack.

Hold it.

You hold it. You hold it. You hold it, Pandora.