50

The first thing Deya felt when she woke up was pain. The back of my head throbbed with pain, my arms stretched on chains ached, my back and right side ached. Recovering herself, the girl was able to lean on her legs to ease the pulling pain in her wrists, on which she saw massive iron shackles. And only after that I was able to look around.

The room she was in looked like an underground grotto: the ceiling was low, and stalactites hung from it, like frozen wax drips from a giant candle. Some of them looked like tree roots or strange outlandish towers, reaching to the floor. Somewhere in the distance, a soft splash of water could be heard.

And very close by, groaning from chronic pain in the back, an already familiar old man was busy. He placed six small tripods at equal distances from each other around a flat, low piece of granite. Deja examined the brown smooth surface of the stone and felt sick. The sorcerer pulled out a coal from one of the braziers near the wall and began to draw