Chapter 3: The Cage of Truth

Consciousness returned not as a gentle dawn, but as a violent, jarring surge. My first sensation was the rough, cold grit of a concrete floor scraping against my cheek, each grain of sand an irritation. My body felt like a stranger’s, a heavy, unresponsive weight I had to drag into consciousness, my limbs leaden and foreign. The air was thick with the scent of forgotten places—a cloying miasma of mildew and decay. A single, bare bulb hung from a wire above, a sickly, jaundiced eye that cast skeletal shadows across the small room. A basement.

I tried to push myself up, my powerful deltoids and triceps straining, but a profound weakness held me down. And then I felt the bonds. I looked down, and a chill that had nothing to do with the damp air traced its way down my spine. The golden, unmistakable glow of my own Lasso. It was not a rough binding; its surface is smooth as worked gold. But the pressure was absolute, pressing the articulated plates of my armor into my ribs, pinning my powerful biceps against my torso, rendering them utterly useless. I was a prisoner in a cage forged from my own sacred power, bound by the dual enchantments of suppressed strength and compelled truth.

The silence was broken by the groan of old, stressed wood. Each creak of the staircase was a deliberate, mocking note in a symphony of my debasement. A figure descended from the darkness, his steps not heavy, but precise. This was not a warrior. This was a hunter of the mind. He came to a stop before me, admiring his work. “There she is,” he said, his voice smooth and proprietary. “The goddess in chains. You may call me Master Vex.”

He paused, letting the name settle. “It was the ancient, tired argument of men who could not compete on a physical field: the claim of mental superiority, a desperate attempt to reframe the rules of power to a game they felt they could win. He needed to believe my power was mindless, because the alternative—a woman possessing both might and mind—was a concept his worldview could not contain.”