Magdalene stared at the doctor in his impassive coat, waiting for him to finish up his drone on whatever it was he was speaking about. There was no burningsense about him that told her he was as alive as she was; instead, there was only a mindless hum like the noise coming from his mouth. All of the doctors were like that, though sometimes they had a spark or two. The spark disappeared quickly, though. None of the spiritquenched, as she thought of them, would allow it to remain for long if they had anything to do about it.

There; he’d fallen silent, and she took it as her signal to leave. A burningcrackle beside her told her that Salamander had joined her, and they walked along the hallways, Salamander phasing through the sightblind. He didn’t like the spiritquenched and tended to stay away when she had to go meet with them for one of her appointments. She wasn’t sure why they wanted to buzz at her so much - at first she’d thought they’d wanted to quench her too, but it was like they were trying to make her burn all the more sometimes.

The first few times they’d tried to make her do that, she’d crackled and snapped at them until they left her alone. After that, they kept pressuring her, but they backed off as soon as she started to protest. She didn’t like it, and Salamander wasn’t comfortable with it, either. If something was going to happen to her, he was the one that was going to do it, not some upstart mortalhuman that was spiritquenched. And so she always resisted whatever it was that the doctors were trying to do to her.

The walls of the Institute were painted with sadness and depression, and the tearsalt that permeated the air constantly made her thirsty. Near the bottom of a few walls were scorchmarks from where Salamander had left his mark so that the other elementals of the Institute would know that he was there. That had been years ago, when she’d first been sent here after Salamander had consumed her parents; now he was just waiting around for the end of her lifespan, so that he could consume her too. In the meantime, though, they were friends.

Had Magdalene been anyone else, the thought that she was friends with someone who would eventually kill her would probably have been at least mildly traumatic. But she'd been living mostly in the spirit world for a large part of her life, and somehow the idea just didn't bother her as much as it might bother someone who had only ever dealt with the so-called "real" world.

Salamander nudged her hip before she could think too much and informed her in flickers that Kahn was feeling particularly blackhurt right then, and she should probably talkspeak to him to help him. Allies were only useful if they were alive, after all, and though the doctors did their best to keep anyone from hurting themselves, some people still managed it.

Crossing the compound, she passed irreverently by the various peoplecolors that she saw, some bright happiness while others were dreary drugged in appearance; dull and almost spiritquenched, as if they'd had a wet blanket thrown over them. She'd gotten used to them quickly, as was necessary for living in the Institute.

Kahn's room was one of the few that didn't require two roommates to live together. He'd scared away all of the others, because he could see the spirit plane in a way that Magdalene couldn't: he saw the future of it, whereas she saw the present. The first time they'd met, he'd informed her that she was going to die in a fire, and she'd told him that she already knew that. Kahn couldn't see Salamander in the right-now, but he could see what he looked like in the future.

Entering his room, the dark bleakhurt washed over her from every surface, and she squinted her eyes to see through the gloom toward where Kahn was sitting on his bed, hunched over and arms wrapped around his body as if he was harmedcold, though she didn't see any sort of wound on him. Maybe he was just cold? She couldn't feel it anymore, because Salamander always kept her warm. But the blackness was puzzling, and she forged her way through the stalebitter air to his side.

Kahn didn't understand her all the time, especially when she used the quick, popping firewords that she liked; he understood the earthwords a lot better, so she switched to them as she cuddled up against his side. He was one of her few friends in the Institute, other than Salamander, of course, and she didn't want him to taste so nasty.

So she rumbled and growled to him, grating her voice like two rocks against one another, and then waited for him to speak. His words were like the drone that the doctors used, but she heard the colors behind them, and knew what he was saying to her. The doctors were going to start doing something soon, and it was something that none of them wanted to be around for. Of course, they wouldn't be able to escape or fly away, because they couldn't; none of them could. Something was going to happen, and he was black and white, both longing for a quick death and terrified of all the consequences.

Magdalene looked at Salamander, who smoldered for several seconds before offering a pop like a knot burning through into ash. It didn't seem like he knew what to do either, so she turned back to Kahn with a soothing whisper of wind through tree branches, projecting a calm greenyellow to hopefully cheer him up. That was backed up by fiery readiness though, ash and smoke signaling her preparation to take on whatever it was that threatened.

Kahn said something else to her that still ached with black, but she hushed him with a gentle roar and then soothed him away from the darkness with the taste of peppermints and spring, singing a rumbling noise like a purr to him. He didn't need to worry, she was readywaiting for whatever came their way.

Over the next few days, the spiritquenched called her aside again and again, far more often than they'd ever done before. They pressed her to make her burn more often, until Salamander was confronting his dislike of them to come along with her and scorch them if they should get too close. Magdalene was just as happy for this, as she didn't want to deal with them herself; she wouldn't ignite the fire within herself the way they wanted to, and it wasn't like they would be able to tell if she did so in the first place. They were spiritquenched; headblind and useless, as Salamander pointed out. They couldn't tell what was going on in front of their faces unless someone pointed it out after it became blatantly obvious.

The most frightening part had been when they tied her down to a coldmachine that reminded her distinctly of the spiritquenched themselves, and placed sticky hurtpads all over her to steal her thoughts from her head and write them out where everyone could see it. She'd fought, then, and Salamander dove in and out of the machine until it finally recognized his presence and melted down, as metal should do in the presence of a proper fire elemental.

Kahn was pulled aside often as well, and so were others that were particularly brightliving, the ones who knew the most. Unfortunately, most of them didn't have a guard like Salamander, and he refused to do anything for them, because they weren't her. So Kahn and the others were forced to fight back with whatever means they had at their disposal - of course, considering some of the skills that a couple of them had, they were in no way helpless. One woman had a close affinity to fire, much as Magdalene herself did, though she had no Salamander to accompany her. The last that she'd seen of that woman, the doctors were escorting out a deathbag that smelled of burnt flesh and lingering fear, along with a faint whiff of blazing triumph from someone else - the woman, she assumed. Other times, she'd seen different deathbags being carried out, each one surrounded by a fading miasma of colors that marked the loss of someone from the Institute.

Why were they being pushed so harshly like this now, when before everything had been so calmrelaxed and taking their time? Now there was fearanticipation swirling all around, and the lightningtaste had her on edge all the time. Salamander refused to go look, for though the spiritquenched couldn't see him, he couldn't live without the fire in the soul for very long, and he didn't want to. She didn't have the power to force him to do it, either. So for now they were blind to whatever plans the doctors had for them, other than the fact that it was bad.

When Magdalene went to sleep in her own bed and woke up tied to a test chair, she knew that whatever it was had come. Reflexively she struggled against the bonds, stilling only after she knew that there was going to be no way for her to escape from them. Rolling her head over, she saw Kahn was strapped to a chair right next to hers, with another person on the other side of him. The same was true to her left as well, another member of the Institute lying still in his chair. She could feel the stickypads attached to her head in various spots, and see them on the heads of those other people that she could see in the room.

There was something wrong, though, that she couldn't quite name. Something about the world, about the way it warped and wavered around her. She couldn't see anything in particular...which was the problem, she realized. The auras and colors and tastes she'd lived her whole life with were gone. If Salamander was with her, she couldn't tell. The sudden realization of her utter blindness swamped her in panic, and if she could she would be throwing off sparks of white and red, but she couldn't see them in the least. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before when the spiritquenched had attached her to the coldmachines in the past. From the vague wordsounds that she could hear drifting through the air, the senseblindness had happened to all of them.

A blaze of whiteterror struck her heart, and her eyes went wide. What if they had all been made spiritquenched? What if the doctors had sucked away their lifefire to fill their own emptiness, and left them spiritquenched in return? Would Salamander even come for her, now that she was emptydead of all soulspark?

When one of the doctors came in to the room, it was all she could do to keep from wailing a blaze at him, though the fear that she wouldn't even remember the firespeak helped to keep her quiet. She could remember speaking it in the past, but what if trying to say it now didn't work? She didn't want to find that out, and so stayed silent.

Similar fears didn't seem to hold some of the others in check, for they burst out in sounds as soon as the impassiveman entered, and she couldn't hear many of the subtleties that she was used to. He waited until there was silence before making wordsounds at them all, which she couldn't understand even as she once had. Ancient memory stirred, from the time before the spirit world had overlaid everything for her, informing her of the familiarity of some of the wordsounds. He was talking about...making them ready for something? She couldn't tell. She didn't remember enough from before then, from before she lost the wordsounds except for through the spirit world.

She didn't have time to try and remember more though, as the doctor turned and left the room, and a strange humming started up. The sticky hurtpads on her skin sparked and sizzled at her, and the humming got louder, and suddenly she was blinded and deafened as everything she'd been searching for came crashing back down at her. All the tastes and scents bombarded her and she gagged at the rancidhatred and the stalepain that permeated everything, while malevolence dripped from every surface.

But there was more than just that as the screaminghum that came from the machine - it was hot and burned in a sickly way, not the icy freeze of the other machines - increased. Looking at Kahn, she met his wide, fearterror eyes with her own, as suddenly she realized that, more than just seeing him as she usually did, she could feel him in her head. Flashes of various possible futures, some of his/her own and some that she didn't recognize, blazed in front of her, and she realized what he always lived with.

His eyes drifted to the side and up, before widening as if startled to see something. That was when Kahn said a single word, but not in the earthspeak that he liked but his first word in firespeak: the word that was Salamander. Turning to look herself, she found the fire elemental hovering in the corner, blazing with rage and hatred in a way that she'd never seen before. She could barely recognize him, so fierce were his flames, but his eyes glowed with the same cracklepop that characterized him in her mind. Ah! He had been able to melt the coldmachines before, when they were testing things. Maybe he could melt this one too? It was so hot that it stung, so it should be no problem to make it just a little hotter, right? She hissed at him weakly, and saw as he acknowledged her for a second, before turning his attention back to the machine. It was like he was waiting for something specific...

Meanwhile the harsh gratingshriek grew louder (or was it just that it was more Intense?) and she felt the minds of each of the different people in the room, one by one. All of their abilities began to mesh and melt into a lump, and she desperately clung to her own senses, trying to keep them separate from everyone else. And then Salamander blazed at her, and in her surprise, she lost the hold on them, and she felt herself submerged into the chaotic mess.

That was, of course, when Salamander struck. As the hotmachine reached its peak, he flared spectral battlewings out to either side and struck with a firestorm, blazing into the machine and those who were controlling it, gathering up the fire that had built into himself and using it to further destroy everything. To her senses, as they suddenly snapped back to her with the death of the hotmachine, everything became cooler as Salamander sucked the flames into himself. He wouldn't need to feed for a long time to come, she knew.

The power that was escaping and returning to everyone in the room was accompanied by other soulfire the streamed out of the room and, she assumed, to the spiritquenched it had been taken from in the first place. It made her feel better, to know that people weren't naturally like that. However, it also meant that they had to somehow take care of the doctors before they came back and tried to quench themselves once more.

Salamander curled down from the ceiling, eminently contentsatisfied with himself, glowing like a banked fire. He settled next to her and licked at her bindings, scorching them away without burning her. As soon as she was free, she ran to Kahn and freed him as well, before turning to the exit. Rumbling a few instructions to him, she ran from the room, content in knowing that he would begin freeing the others. Salamander ran at her side, leading her to the doctors where they had watched everything.

Entering the room, she looked at each of them where they were lying on the ground, and had trouble recognizing them at first. They had soulfire, though it was a marginal amount compared to everyone else in the Institute, and she wasn't used to it. One of them twitched - the doctor who had always pulled her aside, clad in impassivity and uncaring. He had the least firespark within him, but he looked at her, and recognized her for who she was. Surprisefear rolled off of him at the sight of her, and he attempted to regain his feet but couldn't.

Magdalene stared down at the doctor before her - he was the head of the project that was supposed to take advantage of those that they called lunatics and use them to further their study of the human mind and all the different powers that it had. She knew that now, with what he'd been pouring at her in his wordsounds. They wanted to use those who had lived at the Institute as if they were naturally spiritquenched with no light or fire within them; maybe it was because they had almost no fire to use for themselves. She wasn't sure.

However, she was sure that they couldn't be allowed to continue with what they were doing. She wasn't going to allow herself to be used like that, and she knew that Salamander wouldn't allow it either. She wouldn't allow Kahn to be used like that, or anyone else who had lived with her in the Institute. Opening her mouth, she spoke the same wordsounds that had condemned her parents to Salamander's hunger and placed the same fate upon the doctor and all of the other worthless spiritquenched.

“Burn them.”

And as she walked away to meet up with Kahn, Salamander laughed in a ripple of hisses and obeyed.