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The Price of Survival

Summary:

I've been watching Rings of Power recently and have fallen for Halabrand.

Written with day 10 whumptober in mind - whipping

Chapter Text

The whip cracked in the air and landed with a smack on his back. The guard drew it away slowly making sure that the tiny spiked teeth on it went deep in the skin. Halbrand screamed into the leather gag in his mouth. He could hear the whip trailing along the floor and a titter of laughter amongst the men gathered in the hall. He couldn't see any of them. All Halbrand could see was fire; red and orange and yellow and bits of gold dancing before his eyes. The stoked hearth was so close to him, in a way he was fortunate that it didn't blind him. If one could call the position he was in lucky. He was suspended over a vast fire; in another life it was a vast welcoming fire place. His home...his family's home....but that was all gone now.

The hall of his that he had ran through, fought with with his family, had his first kiss in…it was now filled with monsters, men…orcs. There was blood everywhere and the fire, the centre piece of it all, that was what was going to kill him. The dark black borders were just on the corners of his vision. But, the fire, licking flames destroying bits of his clothes, his hair, his face…the heat was painful, raw and not enough to kill him. The acrid smell of burning bodies and whatever poison they had used to make it so huge made him want to be sick.

There were ropes at his ankles and his wrists, the material was so tight that he'd started to bleed. A red, brown puddle was forming on the floor just below him. He was not tied up very high, two feet perhaps. The ropes were attached to a set of pillars that supported the hall and some of the beams at the top. His arms were yanked up hard, just enough to hurt without dislocating his shoulders and his legs were pulled akimbo in a similar fashion. But the fire, that was the issue...it was ironic and twisted. He had spent most of his life around fires; he liked creating things, buildings weapons, armour, sets of jewellery...for anyone...but for Calida especially. No, he couldn't think about her, not her or the girls.

The whip had been an added touch; a joke amongst the soldiers that he could not be burned by fire...so they needed to think of something else. When they had taken him, he had fought....for all their jokes Halbrand was a soldier, well he was a lot of things. But he knew how to fight and broken three of their noses and two arms, he had even knocked one of them unconscious. However, it simply hadn't been enough, he was fodder to them, something to break and play with. He had to be brought low, to be taught the rules that he had refused to follow and...this...this...burning and the whip was what they had come up with. So, they had stripped his top half and cut his stomach “lightly” as a warning, they’d removed his boots to make sue he “really felt the flames”.

It caught his flesh and he couldn't stop himself screaming into the gag again. He pulled against the restraints shooting pain into his wrists and his feet. He managed to wrench against the ropes a little bit and got too close to the sparks, they singed his brown hair and he swore in the gag. The lashes continued as the minutes wore on, he could feel a dampness dripping down from his neck, his back and some of his arms, yet more of his blood he presumed. At strike twenty his vision began to blur and go grey, by strike thirty he was no longer awake and although the flames burned the edges of his fingers and his wrists he didn’t feel it.

At strike forty, they took his body down to check if he still was breathing. To their surprise and frustration he was very much still alive, his breath was shallow and broken but there.

“Up!!!” one of them screamed

Halbrand’s response was to groan. When they held him up to be inspected, he felt a scaley emaciated hand raise his chin up. He blinked…he couldn’t understand what they were saying, so he spat at them. Then his head fell forward and he passed out.