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For a long time there had been nothing else for Chauhn to listen to but the rapid staccato beating of his heart combined with the scratchy scratch inhale of his breath. For several hours, Jin-Ho had been gone, leaving instead with a bitter taste in his mouth and an even sorer wound in his stomach. The man had come not so long ago, bearing items and trinkets to help the boy who had been banished to the dungeons, and he had used magic to help repair and heal the dagger wounds buried in his hands, but instead of patching up the boy, he only seemed to be able to jab his fingers into the wound with salt and vinegar. Chauhn usually felt cheered and fixed by the man whenever he was given counsel from him, but this time Chauhn felt no such relief. He laid himself back on the cold ground and continued to hold his hands to his chest, and heave dry sobs into the stillness of the dungeon.

...Until he heard a frantic spattering of footsteps. Chauhn lifted up from the floor of his cell, looking blearily at the dark shape that was the door. He gulped, trying to swallow back the thick coating of spit in his throat, and then he made a sound in reply that sounded like a strangled, "Hello...?"

Of possible people that could be down there to see him, there were only a few. Sloane would not dare come close to his cell, Chauhn was convinced, and Sage wouldn't come without a group of guards. Jin-Ho had already appeared to show his fatherly concern and Yizhaq was somewhere beyond Chauhn's knowledge. Who else did he know who had a feminine voice and a light fall of steps?

Chauhn shifted closer to the door and lifted himself up onto his arms, his hair a matted and stringy mess in his face. "...Who are you?"

"Ahm...Ahm Chauhn Clemmings," the boy croaked in response, trying to raise his voice, "Ahm the lord Yizhaq's page...ahm...They took m'brother away from me..."

Chauhn manuvered himself closer to the door, attempting to pull himself up from the ground to see through the slot in his heavy wooden door and out to the mysterious voice outside. His legs were trembling and after all the screaming and struggling and lying prone to the cold in nothing but his hospital clothes, he had lost strength over his limbs. He had to lean himself up against the door to hold himself up. Being the small stature that he was, he wasn't able to see completely out of the slot in the door, but he did see something that frightened him.

Sage.

It looked like Sage. The sound that ripped out of Chauhn's throat then was a terrible compilation of fear and hate, a blast of raw emotion that propelled him back from the door and onto the floor. He scrambled against the cold ground, shivering and whimpering again in response to the figure of sage standing in the dim lit hallway behind. "NO! DON'T! DON'T!" he shouted, "'AVEN'T YOU DONE ENOUGH?! 'AVEN'T YOU TAKEN ENOUGH FROM ME?!"

Oh, if only this well-meaning lady had known the crime that he had committed. She might have turned tail and fled,fearful not only for the little plague in her box but also for her mortal well-being. It was a good thing that a cell's wooden door and metal stood between them, leaving only the boy's pallid and gruesome face to be seen. He was a developing monster then, having initially discovered the transformation and his terrible abilities only a few moments before. Right now, he was a tornado at rest, a momentary lapse of insanity, the inhalation of the wave before it swelled and crashed upon the shore. But who could tell this, especially someone who did not know the boy and his faltering sense of stability.

So when it was that Chauhn screamed and leaped back from the door in fear, shouting the name of Sage to that echoed and reverberated down the hall, he completely and entirely believed that it was Sage, come again to yell at him and drag him across the floor and perhaps clap him into chains for a session of torture. He moved away from the door, pushing himself with his bare feet scuffing along the floor so that he was pressed up against the back of the cell and into a corner just behind the soggy mattress that also occupied his cell.

From that corner, seeing the mess of a woman pressing herself against the few slits in the front of his cell, highlighted by the dim torchlight beyond and all the more panicked for the fear mirrored off him, he refused to move. The candy remained outstretched in the woman's hands if she didn't drop it from the amount of shivering that she was convulsing with, and without her coming into the cell herself, Chauhn wouldn't move close to take it. Her image of fear was, in itself, a deterrent to a boy who was too otherwise occupied with fear for himself to try and think of carefully learned manners.

Though he did have the kindness to say, "Please," after he wailed again. Manners, at that point, had been bred into him, leading to the effect that he was that much more pathetic. Begging for her to leave him to his dark confines. "Haven't you done enough?! Ah want my brother back, ahm cold 'n' ahm hungry..." he said between chattering teeth, "Just...Lemme be...Ah want Yizhaq...Ah want Yizhaq! Leave me alone! Please, ah want Yizhaq!" It was a plaintive cry, and afterward, his stomach growled. It had been some since he had eaten, and even longer since that he had eaten a decent meal that wasn't the soupy nutritional staple of the medical ward he had just recently escaped. Chauhn clapped his stiff and recently re-bandaged hands over his stomach, giving a faint moan.

Words were intangible things. Words were things that Chauhn could hardly read nonetheless spell, and words were flighty things that he never trusted within moments of first meeting, not for himself at any rate. There were times before when he had put himself on the line for others, well, to be correct, other, as he had only ever ignored his usual tendencies to flee from promises and assurances like they were the disease ridden mosquitoes and flies steaming off of corpses for the sake of his brother. That was the only time, and here and now, the only person he had to worry about was himself. Sage or stranger, he didn't want to trust either.

Instincts decreed that he, again, for a third time, deny the woman. Harsh were the lessons that he had learned in his years of caring for himself, a lowly urchin underneath the heel of middle class society on the Imisese shore. He had learned not to take candy from a stranger.

But he was hungry. Dreadfully hungry. Jin-Ho on his visit down had not brought anything substantial for Chauhn to ravenously devour, and his stomach had long since been used to the street child's diet that he used to subsist on. His stomach had expanded thanks to Yizhaq's generous meals. He was a growing boy, striving to overcome the stunt of growth his lack in nutrition had given him before.

With his bottom lip trembling while his nose and brows pinched into a defensive snarl, Chauhn barked at her, hugging himself still tighter. "Drop it into m'hand! Ah won't take it from your 'and like a duck, ah won't!" he said, already hating the words that were coming out of his mouth. If he wasn't going to be a duck, he was going to be a rat, born and thriving in the gutter, all matted fur and skittish fingers. He wasn't anything better than a rat anyway, not after what he had done. His gut folded in on itself and Chauhn felt the ghost of guilt clamber onto his back. No, he wasn't anything better than a rat, belly in the gutter and scrambling for crumbs. There wasn't much else in the cell for him, so he might as well take what he could.

"Don't touch me," he said in warning, pursing his cracking lips together. And slowly, he crawled forward from his corner, aiming only to open his still healing hands for the offered relief. His fingers were shaking when he outstretched them.

"Are you sure...? It'll help...?" Then quietly, almost inaudible, he muttered, "...Thank you, mum."

The soft words of encouragement did their part in urging Chauhn to take what sweets he could, a few morsels of energy which he desperately needed for his hungry little body. His stomach was practically crawling up his throat in an attempt to flee the hideous and dark feelings festering in his gut, reaching for the sweet hard candy. Desperation, a dangerous solution to be mixed with what he was pressing between his lips, was what stirred there. As soon as he gathered what candy the strange nameless woman offered, Chauhn slunk back into the shadows, the charcoal image of a feral child, his knees close his shoulders and his arms tucked to his chest as he sucked on the candy. It was sweet, but not too sweet because it was just enough for him to enjoy without flinching from the tartness. It had a warm flavor, sticky, but it also had a powdery taste, something that was bitter at first before it was overcome by the slickness of the honey. He didn't know quite what it was. It wasn't a roll of bread and it wasn't a cold apple, but it was something, even if it only made him realize his hunger all the more.

Sadness, then, overcame him, recollected feelings of being on the street just days after the death of his family, begging passersby for help of any kind. He was only twelve when it had happened, he had been working with his brother Michi until that point. First, he had attempted to accost those that he had worked for before, people who, upon hearing the sudden death of the Clemming's family and Chauhn's possibility of spreading the Plague, slammed the door on him, leaving him hungry. There were only a precious few who bothered to toss out what scraps of food they were willing to part with from windows, but that couldn't help the boy stave off the hunger of a growing child. For that first month alone, Chauhn perhaps ate as much as he could circle around with the curve of his arms, a desperately small ration for thirty days worth of struggle. It was that same kind of hunger memory that plagued him now, which grew and transformed into the memories of his family and their own meager meals, which were made as extravagant as possible for the sake of pleasing the children. They would play at being lords and ladies, princely paupers, serving with eloquence and warping the etiquette because they knew not what the wealthy said to each other when they handed each other ripped up pieces of bread so stale as to only be edible when soaked with broth. What emotions would have splayed across their faces were they alive to find out of Chauhn's initiation as a Lord's page? What disappointment would darken their features had they seen the violent and terrible way that Chauhn destroyed his honor and family name? Chauhn, with a choke on the candy that crunched into slivers between his teeth, felt a rush of tears to his eyes.

"...Thank you mum..." he muttered, his words a soft skeleton of a voice between his suck of the candy, "...But...please, leave me alone...Leave me alone..." He didn't need her anymore. He had those memories with him, bitter and sweet, memories of his family.

Already, his body's temperature was beginning to rise, the unknown drug making it's terribly slow way into his young blood stream, filtering through in tiny filaments that would, in an hour's time, be racing through him, ripping his sensibilities apart. He knew not what he had ingested was meant to implant delusions. He only knew that the taste of candy, once a rare treat given to the youngest in his family at the end of hard working week, would and was already, inspiring images of his family's memories.

Chauhn thought that those recollections were the magic, not the drugs that would eventually take hold and render his thin shattered sanity into a finely punched dust.

She was right. They helped.