The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

When Nyx told me the can of tuna would give me enough energy to get me on my feet, she meant just that—and very little more. I could walk, but still felt light-headed and positively drained (in the most literal sense possible).

“Get what you think you’ll need,” Nyx ordered.

“Can I get something to eat first? Something with a little more—” I raised a hand and wiggled my fingers, using the international sign language for magic. And, uhh, jazz, I guess.

“Life force?” Nyx asked. “I imagine you’ll find no shortage of that where we’re going.” She stood there, staring at me for a moment.

I stared back at her, still wearing nothing but sweatpants, listlessly scratching my ass.

“You’re going to go like that?” Nyx finally said.

“Don’t really see why not. I mean, it’s not like I’ve got armor or anything. Just blink us in so that we can get this over with.”

Nyx stared at me, her motionless mask of a face feeling like a scowl. “We’re walking.”

“Walking? Wait, we?”

She nodded slightly. “Yes, walking. You obviously don’t understand how teleportation works. I can’t become there unless I’ve truly been there, in the universal sense, having meditated deeply upon how the fabric of time and space—” Nyx trailed off.

I’d been trying my best to look like I understand, but I suppose feigned understanding means little when you’re talking to a psychic.

She shrugged slightly. “I do not look forward to teaching you how to do that.”

“So heel-toe express it is,” I nodded to her. “Now the second part—what do you mean by ‘we’?”

“A master can’t take her pet out for a walk now and again?” Nyx asked.

Oh great, it was back to the pet talk. Then again, she hadn’t heard me use the name she’d given me. Maybe she thought I didn’t appreciate it.

As though sensing my annoyance, she added, “We don’t know what has contaminated the water. I want to make sure it’s something you can destroy.”

I smiled. “Sounds like someone’s growing fond of me.”

“It would be a shame to have to manage the thralls myself,” she replied in an almost playful tone.

Moments later I stood by the door, dressed in a slightly-more-proper tee shirt, jeans, and old sneakers that were about three threads and a piece of duct tape away from falling completely apart.

“No weapon?” Nyx asked.

I had been so hungry that the thought of killing with anything but my hands hadn’t even crossed my mind. “Do you think I’ll need one? I mean, I’ve got the touch, right?”

Nyx shrugged indifferently. “Unarmed humans tend to attract armed humans. I’d like to keep on the task at-hand, if possible.”

I chuckled as I opened the door, holding it for Nyx as I said, “Trust me; if everyone’s on the pink water, most of the armed humans will be too busy mugging their refrigerators to bother us.”

As I predicted, the walk to the pumping station was extremely uneventful. Nyx and I had spent the entire trip in silence, though from her head movements, I got the sense that she actually enjoyed walking about unfamiliar places, and seemed content taking in the open space of the abandoned neighborhood we traversed and park we cut through. It struck me as strange that a demon would enjoy the warm afternoon sun. Then again, all demons were once human.

I mentally told Nyx to direct her attention to a brick building at the edge of the park. I used to walk past it every day on the way to school in the old world. In its current state, though, it was barely recognizable. The chain link fence that surrounded it had since been reinforced with sheet metal and razor wire, and atop the orange bricks were sandbag fortifications. A surveillance camera atop a pole at each corner normally whirred about, but they remained lifeless. At least it meant they wouldn’t see us coming.

Nyx stared at the building for a moment.

“The gate is around the other side, facing the road,” I told her. “They had an intercom before—I’d imagine it still works.”

“That will be unnecessary,” Nyx said, walking towards the corner of the fence, pulling open a hole behind a loose piece of sheet metal. “This is likely how they got in.”

I took the sheet from her and pulled as far back as I comfortably could. The gap couldn’t have been more than eighteen inches at its widest. “Do you really think something that’s too much for me to handle could really fit through there?”

Nyx silently lay down next to the hole and, with the inhuman grace of a stalking snake, shimmied through.

“Yes,” she told me from the other side. “Come now.”

I’d never been inside the building, and, frankly, I was a little disappointed when I first walked in. Growing up, it was always a mysterious, windowless fortress that was built into the side of a hill, surrounded by barbed wire and secrecy. My friends and I heard rumors about top secret government experiments, of alien autopsies and genetically engineered man-pig hybrids that occasionally snuck out to wreak havoc. And now, here it was before me, heavy steel door torn from its hinges, uncorking all the mysteries of childhood. It was completely dark inside, but judging by what I saw in the sliver of light that poured through the doorway, it looked like a big empty room with a bunch of noisy industrial junk all over the place. No secret laboratory, no evil super-genious cackling in the corner. Hell, there didn’t even seem to be any intruders inside. It looked like someone had just cleared it out and moved along.

As we crossed the threshold and I moved to feel around the wall for a light switch, Nyx raised a hand to my chest, stopping me mid-stride.

She said nothing. Instead, she took half a step back and jerked her shoulders forward. I could feel a puff of stale factory air blow into my face, and a good chunk of the light from the door became obstructed by something large and dark.

“You have wings?” I thought to her. “I didn’t know that.”

Nyx didn’t dignify my painfully obvious observation with a response. Instead she crouched slightly, then leap straight upwards.

What fell wasn’t Nyx. In fact, it was about as opposite as Nyx as you could get. A small, mangled, pink thing, the size and proportions of a child, only with black, beady eyes, and no hair. It was naked, as most returned were, but without plates of armor like Nyx, animal characteristics like the dogs, or deformities like some of the other creatures—it was almost a dead little boy. And from his back were tiny, rather pathetic-looking wings that likely wouldn’t support flight for anything larger than a fruit bat.

The only sound the creature made was the wet thump as it fell from the rafters, and with seemingly impossible feather-light grace, Nyx gently floated down beside it.

“They are imps,” Nyx told me.

“Are they dangerous?”

“Absolutely. They’re the souls of children who died in torment, whose last mortal thought was disappointment and hatred for the authority that let them die. They exist for nothing more than pure, unadulterated chaos.” With that, Nyx turned to leave.

“Didn’t you just say they were dangerous?”

“To mortal invalids, yes. But you can handle them.” She walked out the door, pausing as she reached the threshold. “One more thing: Don’t let them see you use your power.”

“What?”

“To ensure they don’t continue wreaking havoc here, you need to destroy them all. If they see you use your powers—or if they see me at all—they will hide. And they are exceptionally skilled at hiding. If they see you as a victim, however, they will flock to you. Now, whenever you’re done, I’ll be in the park.”

I knelt down before the creature, taking a closer look at it. On proper inspection, I could see its features weren’t quite that of a human child—the beady little eyes were farther apart, the nose was smaller, almost completely flat, and too far up its face, and its mouth was far too wide for its slightly-too-large head, its lips parting slightly to reveal a row of black, jagged, shark-like teeth. Its hands were adorned with short, pointy, almost squirrel-like claws.

From the distant darkness, I heard a woman’s laugh. I felt around the machinery, finding a vat mercifully close to the door that would shield me from what I could now identify as three—no, four distinct voices talking from behind a closed door.

Then a tiny square of light came on in what seemed to be an office at the far end of the treatment plant.

The teenage girl named Lego flicked on the office light as she dragged the bound and gagged woman up the metal staircase. The woman reacted as Lego had figured she would: Limp and defeated, knowing her life was coming to an end, but blissfully ignorant about how.

“Lego,” her friend asked from behind her in a hissing whisper. “You sure we gotta do this already?”

“They’re getting bored, Berry,” Lego replied, eyes-front, mind on-task. “We have to do something.”

Berry grunted under the weight of her own captive, a fully-grown man who was half-conscious, blood leaking out of a fresh wrench wound in his head. “It’s only been two days since we moved in.”

Lego shrugged. “They’ve just been sitting around in the dark all day. Guess the dark is boring.”

When the girls managed their way into the office, both their captives sprung to life, fighting against their binds. There, in the corner of the office, their children—well, all the children in the facility, at least one presumably theirs—huddled in a corner, chained together at the wrists.

Seeing the sadness in their eyes reminded Lego of how she once was. How they all were. She could barely remember, but at the same time, she could still feel it. Almost like she was still experiencing the horror of watching the imps at play. Almost like she was still innocent—like she hadn’t been long-since broken.

Two boys, Batman and Motorcycle, followed the girls up the stairs, closing the door firmly behind them. Batman glanced around the room, muttering to himself, “C’mon c’mon c’mon” until he spotted a pair of beady little eyes and a wide, black-fanged smile peering at him through the open window leading into the darkened plant.

‘They’re watching,’ he thought to himself. ‘Show time.’

Batman wheeled a pair of blood-soaked chairs from behind the desk, shoving one bound captive onto each before clearing his throat.

“I take it one of these belongs to the both of you,” Batman started, gesturing towards the children.

The man began bawling uncontrollably. The woman simply started at him with steel-blue eyes that practically hemorrhaged with hate.

Batman pulled his kitchen knife from his belt and walked over to the kids, waving the blade in their direction. It was big and dull and chipped and heavy, but it was also a crowd favorite on account of the time it took and the mess it made. “Well, if you don’t want to cooperate with us, we’re gonna start hacking ’til you do. Do we understand?”

Batman stared at the couple in silence. The woman gave a firm, solid nod, then kicked the man, who whimpered and began nodding very quickly.

“Good. Now, normally we start with the girl, but it seems like your husband don’t need to be broken any.” Batman gave the girls a nod, and they sidled in front of the captive man’s chair.

“How long have you been married?” Batman asked.

Motorcycle moved behind the captive wife, removing her gag so she could give her answer.

“Twelve years,” she said as Motorcycle ungagged the husband.

“Has he ever cheated on you?”

The wife quickly looked to her blubbering wreck of a husband, then back to Batman. “We’ll do whatever you want. But only after you’ve let the kids go.”

The little fanged face began to slowly retreat from the window. It’s getting bored. Think fast.

Batman’s arm moved in such a blind panic that he didn’t even realize he was moving it. In a flash, the woman’s left cheek was bleeding, and the blood that he could see seeping into her grit teeth showed that he’d actually slashed her deep enough to punch through.

The little head slowly re-entered the window.

Batman gave a ‘Ha!’ as he slashed forward again, and again, and again, and again, attempting to carve a B into the woman’s cheek. The cuts were messy and poorly aimed, and his masterpiece looked like seemingly random slashes, but the creature in the window didn’t seem to care. It crawled through the window, onto the table, head bobbing up and down a little in excitement.

The woman started screaming at Batman, but that was cut short by a simple, quiet, “Sweety?” from her husband.

“Frank?” The wife looked to her man, then followed her gaze to the little naked shark-toothed creature as it walked, hunched over, bobbing its head, towards the bloodied cheek.

Batman saw the panic in the woman’s eyes and quickly pressed his heel against her chest, keeping her tight against the chair, nearly toppling it backwards. The imp tentatively approached, back hunched, head bobbing, leaning close enough to her cheek that she could smell its rotten-meat breath, and, in a flash, one of its tiny claws lashed out and streaked across her cheek, leaving three deep slashes across Batman’s failed ‘B’.

The creature hissed and croaked in delight as it began hopping up and down. It quickly skittered towards the window, then ran back to the wife, took another chunk of flesh from her cheek, then bounced back to the window.

“But wait,” he said, looking at the woman, but speaking to the creature. “This is just the easy part.”

The creature stopped in the middle of a third trip to the woman’s face, plopping its butt down on the desk, sitting cross-legged like a child at story-time. Behind the creature, another pair of dark, beady eyes crept into the window, drawn by the ruckus of the first.

“We’re not just going to destroy you physically. We’re going to do it psychologically. And while your own children are watching, no less.”

The creature lurched to its feet began hopping up and down in joy again, the second set of beady eyes now joined by a third, this one peeking in from the top left corner of the window, hanging upside down as it watched.

Three. Better make this good. “Girls? Get to it.”

Berry moved behind the husband, cupping his chin to keep his face forward. “Please, if you close your eyes, they’ll take your eyelids,” she whispered, soft enough that her friends wouldn’t hear. “Just try to play along.”

Not in a position to argue, Frank agreed, eyes setting upon the girl before him. She was shorter, and, outside of context, would seem rather innocent looking. She had pale skin and dark black hair, but pale blue eyes much like the ones that he’d fallen in love with. Only this girl’s seemed almost sad. Her features weren’t as sharp as his wife’s; her eyes were wider and her cheeks were rounder. Her style of dress was fairly strange; she looked as though she’d raided a thrift store and picked completely random pieces of clothing to wear: A pair of thin-soled sneakers, an emerald-green knee-length business skirt, a low-cut tank top beneath an open sweater-vest, and around her neck—oh god, was that Marie’s necklace? When they’d taken Marie and her husband the other day and returned without them, he’d feared the worst, but a part of him still hoped they’d gotten away.

The girl’s lips curled into a fake smile as she slid the sweater down her arms, shoulders gyrating awkwardly as her hips swayed back and forth. This made the whole situation seem that much more wrong to Frank. She wasn’t dancing with any sort of sensuality or rhythm; it was almost as though she were simply moving for the sake of moving, dancing as though she’d never heard music before.

The girl’s awkward movements might not have been sexy in and of themselves, but when the girl pulled her top over her head, he realized how little that really mattered. She was a very well-built woman, with a rather glorious pair of tits that, if she ever actually wore a bra, would easily fit a D-cup. Of course, since he’d never seen any of the kids who’d taken over wear anything different, that meant she never wore one. In a moment of bizarre distraction, he wondered how he never noticed.

It wasn’t merely fear or panic that kept this fact from him; the areola were large, and the wide nubs of her nipples were almost flush with them, though they slightly protruded from the air and exposure. A primal section of his brain wondered if those nipples would be as hidden under his palms as they were under the fabric.

Lego undid the zipper of her skirt and unceremoniously stepped out of it, struggling a bit as it caught on the toes of her shoes.

“See that?” Batman asked Frank’s wife as she stared at her husband. “He can’t look away. He’s probably gotten so sick and tired of this used-up old baby-factory that he’s obsessed with this cutie.”

Frank tried to look to his wife, but once his head began to turn, Berry once again grabbed him by the jaw and wrenched it back towards her naked friend.

Lego dropped to her knees in front of the man, unzipping his pants and fishing out his rapidly stiffening member. Anxiety wood was something that he used to hate, but now—well, given that they were ready to rip off his eyelids to make him see her, he didn’t want to think of how they would’ve mangled him to make him fuck her.

Lego straddled the man, reaching between her legs to guide his shaft into her slit. She had to rub him up and down the entrance a couple times, smearing her raven-downed snatch with precum. This usually got her wet enough to start, but today she just couldn’t get into it, and it took a little too long for things to happen naturally. When the ‘friend’ on the table huffed in disappointment, she forced the head in a dry panic. The shock of pain and surprise only lasted a moment until something flicked on inside of her, and from there, it was only a matter of slowly inching down.

The woman turned to Batman as Lego began to ride the helpless husband. “This means nothing,” she growled at him. “He loves me, not her, and nothing in the goddamn world can change that.”

Batman smiled nervously. “What about the kids? You think they don’t see that and think, ‘Daddy doesn’t love mommy anymore’?”

“They’re kids. They don’t even know what fucking is.”

A high-pitched growl came from the desk and window. The peeking faces were now baring their teeth, the flesh of their foreheads crumpling as they snarled into the room. Bored is bad. But disappointed is even worse.

Batman pressed the knife against the wife’s throat and shouted to her husband, “Tell her how much better this is. Now!”

Unaware of the knife to his wife’s throat, Frank dug up the strength to follow his wife’s verbal lead. “I don’t know. This is a lot slower and more mechanical than I like. Nothing like my sweetcakes.”

The hands holding Frank’s head disappeared for a moment, but were replaced by the serrated blade of a steak knife pressing against his windpipe. “I don’t want to hurt you,” Berry said from behind him, “but if you don’t do what we say, you and your wife are going to die. And probably some of the kids, too.”

“I mean, her tits are bigger than yours,” Frank muttered ingenuously. “And her skin is—ah, younger, I guess. Oh, this young vagina is wonderful.”

The wife was quite obviously not disturbed. The little creatures now bared their teeth and growled so hard that a thick drool leaked around their lips. What’s worse, two more heads poked into the window, they too growling in anger. Motorcycle simply stared at them, slowly edging to the farthest corner of the room. Five of the six. There weren’t enough outsiders in here, above and below, to satisfy five of the six.

“Uhh, girls?” Batman murmured. “Do something?”

In a fit of inspiration, Lego pulled off of the man, grabbed Berry’s knife with one hand and his throat with the other, and yanked him out of the chair. Lego threw the man onto the table, right next to the horrid little creature, his dick still slick and at the ready, and she hopped atop him, his cock sliding in much more quickly now. She pumped with speed and rhythm that she’d never thought to try before, and the grunting to which she was accustomed actually started to become moaning.

The creature on the table was less impressed than her by the feat of actually bringing the man pleasure instead of simply making him uncomfortable, and instead of bobbing its head, it bared its teeth and hissed up at her.

Lego ignored this, leaning back as he rode him, the man now completely silent, his wife watching on with slightly less defiance, obviously recognizing that her husband had started enjoying himself.

Suddenly, Lego let out a scream and grabbed the horrible little monster on the table by the shoulder and plunging her knife into its fat little stomach. It snapped at her a few times, clawing the arm that clutched the blade as she pulled it out and drove it back in time with her hips, lifting the creature over the man, splashing its blood all over his body.

The four creatures in the window hissed in delight, all four hopping into the window, jumping up and down with excitement.

When the imp in her hands stopped twitching, Lego dropped the knife to her side and plunged her bare hand into the wound, pulling out bloodied entrails, slathering them all over Frank’s chest. Throughout all her years of servitude, she had never dreamed of building the courage to kill one of them, but her arms acted almost of their own accord, lost in the passion of the moment. The poor husband beneath ehr was in a state of absolute shock as the tiny bits of the creature rained down over him.

Inhuman hissing and yelping pulled Lego’s attention from dismembering the creature as three of the other imps, inspired by the unexpected chaos of her actions, leapt upon the fourth, tearing open its stomach with frenzied fang and claw. All three attackers occasionally turned to throw severed bits at the husband, and the trio bounced and hissed and laughed more intensely than Lego had ever seen before.

Sensing she was on a roll, she picked the knife back up and plunged it into the disgusting little eyeball of another imp. Its screams were ear-piercing, and caused the other two to bounce even higher. She held it to the table by its forehead and continued stabbing at its head, most slashes glancing off its skull, but some punching holes in its eyes and nose. The creature lived for a surprisingly long time, until one firm blow landed square in its forehead, the knife sticking in the bone, making the creature convulse and go limp.

The two remaining monsters now began clawing at each others’ faces, each trying to illicit the same shriek of pain as Lego had achieved. Lego’s hips grew still as she and her friends all watched, dumbfounded, as the creatures ripped eacothers’ eyes out, slashing blindly at eachothers’ faces. At one point, one of the imps caught the other’s clawed hand in its teeth, clamping down and shredding it, but gurgling and freely leaking blood from its now-mangled inner mouth.

The creature with the mouth wound began to saunter, its swings becoming wilder, granting its opponent the opportunity to drive its fingers deep into the eye socket, burying its hand to the wrist, finally bringing the fight to an end.

The last little creature got half-way through its second bounce of victorious glee when something grabbed its head. Another shriek of pain filled the room, the cry quickly becoming hoarse, then inaudible, as the creature shriveled to dust.

Lego and her friends scrambled backwards, pressing themselves against the wall as I climbed through the window, onto the slippery, gore-covered desk.

“What are you?” Batman asked, completely unaware of the irony of his words.

“Is that all of them?” I asked.

I looked from one teenager to the other until Lego finally, slowly shook her head. “There’s one more,” she whispered.

“Then yeah,” I assured her. “That’s all of them.” I walked up to the woman and untied her hands. I expected her to shy away from me when I reached for her, in the same way the sisters had the first time they saw me kill, but she actually reacted with relief, throwing her arms around my neck and whispering a word of thanks.

“Go help your husband,” I told her.

“There’s one more of those fucking kids downstairs, holding the rest of us,” she said. “They’re dangerous. You can’t trust them.”

I placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder as I said, “They’re not dangerous anymore.”

“How do you know?’ Batman finally spoke up, as though my statement were intended as an insult.

“Your violence comes from fear, not malice, am I right?” I turned to the remains of the creatures and followed without waiting for a reply. “Don’t think you have much reason to be afraid of them anymore.” I turned back to Batman with a smile. “Seems all that’s left to fear now is me.”

The wife helped her husband to sit up. His dick was still erect and hanging out of his pants, glistening with Lego’s sex, the love juice starkly juxtaposed with the blood and innards that coated his torso and face.

“Frank, honey—this man’s here to rescue us.” The woman turned to me and said, “This is Frank, and I’m Sylvia.”

“Novak,” I said. I did so with my mind as well, making certain that Nyx heard me use it. I wasn’t keen on the name, but it beat the hell out of ‘pet’.

The corner of the man’s mouth pulled into a smile, and he spoke, still in the grip of shock. “I think my granddad had a carpet roller called No-Vac.”

“Listen, I have a favor I need to ask of you two,”

Sylvia nodded in agreement. Frank stared off to space.

“I need you to listen to something.” I turned towards the row of teenagers, gesturing towards the nude girl on the end. “Lego, right?” I went down the line. “And you’re Berry, Motorcycle, and Batman. Strange names. Tell me how you got them.”

The four looked hesitantly at each other.

“It’s okay. I know your story. But I want to hear it from you.”

“We named ourselves,” Batman muttered.

“We had to,” Lego said. “Our old names made them—they didn’t like us using them.”

I glanced back to Sylvia, to make sure she was paying attention. Surprisingly, she actually was, in spite of what these kids had put her through. “And why name yourselves after toys?”

Lego’s eyes drifted down to her shoes. “We were six.” She slowly looked up to the kids, who were still chained up in the corner. “They let us live,” she continued. “I hope you understand. They killed the teachers, and most of the older kids, but they let us live. Played with us. It was fun at first, but when we get tired, they get bored, and—”

Lego slowly looked to Batman, who had slid down the wall so he could bury his face in his knees.

“Batman was the best at entertaining them, keeping them calm, but that started getting harder every day. Maybe it’s because we were getting older. They hated grown-ups. But they just kept getting meaner and meaner, so we had to do meaner and meaner things to satisfy them. Eventually, they told us just some people weren’t enough. They wanted to hurt everyone. So they made us come here.”

“What did they do to the water?”

“They had a big bag of pills they threw in. And—well, I think the first couple.”

The first couple?

“They broke all the lights so we couldn’t see exactly what they were doing in there,” Batman finally chimed in. “We heard them messing around with one of the machines, and… a lot of ripping sounds.”

“Do you guys know where your families are?”

Berry’s composure cracked, and she instantly dropped to the floor, curling into a fetal mess, bawling.

“Everyone’s parents came to the school at some point to pick us up, to save us.” Lego said. “They—all of them—they’re gone.”

I nodded and thought for a moment. “Would you be willing to help fix what you’ve done here?”

Sylvia objected with a “What?”

“I understand you’d be conflicted,” I told her, “but everything these kids did was to protect your children from those creatures. And they also just saved you and your husband.”

“But you were the one—”

“I killed one.” I pointed to Lego and added, “She killed four.”

“If she wanted to save us, why not kill them earlier?”

Lego answered Sylvia for me. “I’ve seen them kill grown adults with no problem. Armed adults, even. But as long as they thought we were playing, they would never hurt us, even if we accidentally hit them.” Her eyes dropped to her shoes as she added, “I didn’t realize until just now, all I had to do was make it a game.”

“Do you realize what you’re asking? These people killed friends of ours. Sabotaged the water for the entire town. They molested my husband. Tortured my kids.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think you understand. Lego and I just saved everyone in this building from those imps. That means you owe us. All that we ask is that you give these lost kids a real community, and get the town water running clean again.”

Sylvia stayed quiet for a few moments. “I can’t speak for the rest of the group.”

I chuckled. “Of course you can. You’re what—foreman? Manager? By how you handled yourself, I’d assume that you hold a good deal of power among them.”

Her silence confirmed my suspicion.

“So give me your word.”

“If they try anything, we’re going to take them out back and shoot them.”

I nodded. “They won’t. But one more thing.”

Sylivia looked to me expectantly.

“Lego comes with me.”

When Nyx saw me emerge from the building with the dark-haired girl in the bizarre clothing, she stared at me from across the park with a look of annoyance. Lego froze in-place, but a gentle hand on her lower back and an assurance that Nyx wouldn’t harm her and had helped kill the imps was enough to coax her forward at a cautious pace.

“What is this?” Nyx asked us, Lego flinching at the unfamiliar sensation of telepathy.

“A new thrall,” I told her with a smile.

“This is a waste of food. What purpose does it serve?”

I turned to Lego, who watched me expectantly. “She has a gift. Sort of like me.”

“Someone resisting your mind at this juncture is not a cause for celebration,” Nyx said, visibly annoyed.

When I replied, I made sure to speak to Nyx and not Lego. “She didn’t resist, though. She reached out and pulled me in. Showed me what she’d been through. Led me through her memories. She probably doesn’t realize it, but she has a gift.”

Nyx turned and stared at Lego for a moment. “You will be responsible for her instruction. And if she proves to be ungifted, I will make a point of ending her myself.”

Lego tried to shy away, but my hand on her back kept her still.

“First thing is your name,” I told Lego in the most reassuring tone I could muster. “Your old name no longer applies. You’ll just be ‘student’ until you’ve earned a new one.”

She trembled slightly, less reassured by this than I’d intended.

“It means your old life is over,” I told her. “You get to start over again. Spend your new life making things right.”

Student closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and nodded calmly.