*To edit

My consciousness tried to claw far too quickly back into the land of the living, mostly fighting eyes that wanted to remain tightly closed as sore lungs struggled to recover from the bruising of being chucked into an airless realm. For a moment I was unsure where 'here' was, and that jolted my eyes groggily open to the harsh answers of reality. Upon observing my surroundings, the only course of action was to shut it back out by closing my eyes.

Quickly.

Maybe if I ignored it, it would go away.

Of course, the obvious problem with that logic was I seemed to have been restricted to where I could go. Suspended ankles first upside down, arms held prisoner splayed on either side of my body on a stone backing, the blood thumped in my ears as it pooled in my brain.

Furthermore, the burning agitation to simply bite off everyone's head was unparalleled. I had been bested! Me! Celandine Doukas. More than the cut on my cheek, the pain in my head, the aches in my bones; the fact that I'd lost smarted the most. The crushing realisation of what happened made my stomach feel as if it were upside down.

That thought made me pause. Since I was already upside down, surely that meant my stomach felt the right way up? Wiggling each toe experimentally, the prick of pins and needles has slowly begun to creep in.

David was the last face I'd seen. A hiss escaped as the crawling of burning hatred rolled the span of my spine. Of all things, to have fallen into a dirty trap! It hadn't even been a fair fight!

"Ah, Andy you have awoken." The voice drawled. Having heard him speak a hundred times, the resistance to not glare was too great. I conceded to the urge and opened my eyes to survey the frosty surroundings. As he spoke, crawling hollow undertones of the creature possessing him intertwined with his voice, sending a tremor down my spine that didn't stem from the chill.

Lo-and-behold, it was the man of the hour. The cloaked Sorcerer, the necromancer of the dead, David.

"David, I am officially handing in my notice."

We were a huge cavern with sprawling ceilings, the recesses illuminated by soft candlelight. Wooden beams branched tall into the darkened canopy with netting hung strewn between them. Weights of loose brick rested suspended. Stacks of black chiselled rocks supported the lower areas around the edges, and frozen pools of liquid reflected the dim light.

The lack of breeze held the smell of decomposing bodies; strewn everywhere I looked. Some were standing, staring abandoned into the tunnels of darkness. Others were sprawled across the ground as if they were rubbish, and each of them rotted in a different state of decay. As I attempted to concentrate on the magic around the cavern, it became apparent that the flow ran into the corpses, before their mixed sources of power streamed into the man in front of me.

This was not my kind of party, and I would be taking my exit very quickly.

Taking a deep breath I inhaled, pushing magic into my chest ready to light the fire and burn these suckers to the ground. Only to feel it slip out of my grasp. I tried again, only to feel it infuriatingly sink away further. It was as if a greased sludge coated it. I could feel my magic slithering under my skin, clambering to try and find its way out. Still, I was unable to access it. The metal around my wrists grew hot and for the first time in my life, they burnt, my skin reacting to the heat. The breath I was holding gasped free in a rush.

David emitted an empty rattling sound as he began to laugh, the rumble devoid of the essence that made laughter joyful. The bodies around joined in unison but stopped mid-noise when he spoke.

"I have waited a lifetime for this moment." He pushed his hood away from his face.

My brain thought one thing, but my mouth went ahead and acted on its own accord. Brain: I can't access magic, this is bad. Try and find a way out. Mouth: "That's a bit sad isn't it?"

I wanted to blame it on the blood pooling inside my head, and as David's grin eroded at my words I hastily skimmed for any means of escape. Neither my hands nor feet could budge an inch, and grasping my magic remained an elusive task.

His nose crinkled in disgust. "So many years," he spat it out word by word, "I have put up with your nonsense. You are the worst employee I have ever had."

"Why thank you." Oh no. I cringed. Why mouth, why would you do this to me?

He grabbed my hair, pulling viciously so that I was forced to look up and face him. "The SPCC assigning you to my store was a stroke of pure luck. Despite your ability to work being so useless, I have dreamt of the day I would find a way to kill you and claim you as mine. Finally, you would contribute to something!"

I felt my mouth curl up, "David I'm pretty sure if I was that terrible you could have just hired somebody else, and we would have both been happier."

He threw my head back against the frame I was strapped to.

"Oh no, I was biding my time, waiting, watching..." Black filled his eyes. "Evaluatinggg." The word was strung out oddly as if the syllables were hard to pronounce. A feeling similar to the empty void of the realm his minions pulled me into emanated.

My heartbeat raced. If I couldn't burn them, I sure as hell wasn't staying around. Muscles tensed as I coiled my magic ready to explode out of the two-legged form and rip apart the suckers... the hold on my magic dispersed. What?

I tried again since it wasn't even a spell, it was quite the opposite. All I needed to do was unravel the skin that held me.

"Don't waste your time," David smirked. "The constraints you are bound with have been specifically enchanted for you. Not a single speck of your magic will pass in any direction."

No words jumped into my mouth, not a thought passed my mind. It was an empty void that pulsed to the beat of my own heart where the crushing emptiness was quickly filling. There was no backup plan. I was always my plan B.

There was nothing.

The very fabric of who I was had gone. Trapped in a weak humanoid body, with no magic, no spells and blood rushing to my head, all I felt was empty.

And that changed everything. I understood what Leo had meant when he said I just needed to stop looking. The way to both see the magic that existed and what had been used. In the absence of my magic, I could finally see the faint overlay of the Dybbuk inside David, the man who was both alive and dead.

The Dybbuk had drained what was left of David to the point where they could no longer be separated. David was rotting from the inside out as the Dybbuk took hold.

"So what's the plan?" I asked him. "Is this the point where you sacrifice me and make me one of your puppets?"

An animated smile crept onto David's face. "I hadn't planned on killing you for a few more hours. I must admit, you've sent everything into quite the disarray. I'd set the perfect trap until I discovered that girl covered your shift instead. A clever tactic on your part." He pouted. "Of course, you managed to evade me a second time by sending that vampire to your home instead. What a waste of time that was."

I literally had no idea what he was on about, but the longer I let him rant, the less murdering was happening.

"Of course, I'd already taken steps to ensure every source of magic was at my disposal. I couldn't believe my luck when you were sat in my most rigged location of all!" He continued to mutter. "Now we must wait for the moon to become full..."

"And about what time will that be?" I interrupted him. "What's the time now?"

David didn't answer, a vein twitching in his forehead.

"Why did you need a dragon?" The question was almost a whisper. He seemed less annoyed at that question.

"To destroy the veil which holds the realms!" He boomed, shrugging as if it were the most obvious thing.

Leofstan's warnings about the portals echoed in my head. "Wouldn't that just kill us all?"

"Perhaps, or it will finally bring together the worlds, allowing for unlimited magic." Full of wonder he added. "A new world."

"And I'm going to be sacrificed for this because..?"

He threw back his head arms spread wide. "Because no mortal can hold open a gate permanently of course; our power is finite."

Goosebumps lifted across my fleshy skin.

He sighed dramatically, arms crashing to his side as he lamented; "Only Gods and dragons are conduits powerful enough to create passages to last a millennia."

David slowly grinned, the smile stretched far too big to fit a human face, distorting past acceptable boundaries. "Now I will have both a dragon under my control. Combined with the sources of all the dead bound to me, I can truly become a God."

As he talked I made more futile attempts to grasp my energy stores; desperate to achieve even a spark, but there was nothing. Cold sweat ran down my back as I tried to keep my breathing steady. This was all Leofstan Ortwin's and the council's fault. If I hadn't signed up to the SPCC I'd never have met David in the first place.

This psycho was going to kill me. I'd end up being puppeted around by this middle-aged wannabe with no magic of his own, who wanted to call himself a God.

And even worse I could picture sodding Leofstan Ortwin's face seeing my corpse, telling me it was my fault. He'd told me to stay in the room. He was going to be so freaking smug.

"Soon, Celandine, you will finally be silenced for all eternity."

That wouldn't be a problem, since I'd long run out of things to say already.