The first day in his 'care' was relatively mild compared to what she expected; he only drew her blood and watched the slow pace of the liquid. Following that, he listened with a small metal device to her heart, counting out the slow beats against a little hourglass that appeared to only last a minute, something she was rather curious about as she had never seen one that was both so little, and timed only a minute rather than an hour.
When she asked if it was a minuteglass and not an hourglass, he ignored her.
Her heart rate was timed out at twenty beats per minute, consistent throughout the day as he timed it, again and again, mumbling that it would explain why her blood did not flow as fast as it would in any other species.
He cut her skin and watched it heal, shone an obnoxious light in her eye by carefully lifting a directional lantern to her face, covering her eye and then uncovering it over and over, watching intently how her pupils reacted to the change.
He seemed overly fascinated with her eyes, though she did not know why and when she saw the diagram he had drawn, she finally realised. Her pupils were not round like his, but slightly elongated, and she understood right then why she could see well in the dark.
Her eyes were more like those of a feline than a human.
She had not expected to learn anything new about herself, but there it was.
He moved on to testing her reflexes, her skin elasticity, and pressed an iron rod against her arm, monitoring the burning and then the agonisingly slow healing, all while ignoring her screams of pain.
She had tried to escape only once, and when she very nearly ripped his hand off his arm, he opted to wrap her chain around a ring on the wall instead of simply holding it.
The chain was incredibly odd, having been looped twice around the ring but not tied or locked at all, and no matter how hard she pulled on it, the loops refused to slip free or even so much as budge. It was infuriating that something so simple could so completely trap her.
He enjoyed watching her struggle with it, unwilling to tug at the end around her neck for fear of it choking her again, and the more she stared at the stupid thing, the angrier she got.
He refused to answer any of her questions, but if she refused to answer one of his, he would simply slap her, the blow brutally hard.
The first time he struck her she had been thrown bodily to the floor, not at all expecting the blow and certainly not the sheer force of it.
The second time she had only fallen against the wall, clutching her face and whimpering.
The third time, and from then on, she only staggered, clutching the wall to keep from falling.
He was very fond of hitting her, which was something she did not appreciate at all. Not that he tended to care what she appreciated, and what she did not appreciate.
After he had finished his examinations, he sat down at the table and made his notes, muttering quietly under his breath and asking her questions. They were all incredibly personal questions, and she was very quick to learn that it did not matter if she wanted to answer them or not, she would be answering them, or she would be hit.
"You are biologically female…?" he asked quietly.
"Yes," she had said moodily, glaring at him from where she sat on the floor.
"Were you born in Faerie?"
"Yes."
"Have you any children?"
"No."
"Are you infertile?"
"No."
"Are you sexually active?"
"No." She did not know what the questions had to do with anything.
"Have you ever had a sexual partner?"
"No," she growled.
His expression showed his interest at that. "Interesting. Do you eat human food?"
"No."
"Do you eat human meat or only the meat of mythical creatures?"
"Both."
"Do you have body functions?"
"Such as what?" she asked slowly, her cheeks flushing.
"Urinate, bowel movements? Do you menstruate?"
"No, none of those."
"How old are you?"
"Nine hundred and something. Don't really keep track."
"What is your name?"
"Etani"
On it went until he finally decided to leave, and she sighed, her arms wrapped tight around her legs as she finally managed to get some sleep.
***
On the second day, he grew more curious, testing her saliva and blood, forcing her to eat various oddities and monitoring to see how long it would pass. They did not.
By day three he had realised that she had no normal bodily functions, even though she had told him she did not, and his interest grew. She realised that he had been testing her, monitoring, to see if she was lying. That in itself would have given him more of a hint as to what she was, and she immediately became more wary of him. Only certain species are capable of lying.
By day five he had graduated to removing her teeth, only after commenting vaguely on the odd shape of her canines. Like a vampire, yet only barely longer than any of her regular teeth. He removed two of her fingernails and attempted to break or bend them. They bent with enough pressure and finally split, but it took quite a bit to get them to break and he found he could file them down using an odd blacksmith's tool.
He broke her bones and watched them heal, marvelled over her teeth and nails growing back in a matter of hours.
By the end of day ten, he had gone so far as to dissect her.
He cut open her arm and examined the internal structure. He removed a finger for ease of access, cut open her belly and noted that while she had intestines, they did not join on to her stomach. They were, in essence, simply there for the sake of it, because they were meant to be there and had exactly no practical use at all.
He was very careful, never taking her quite over the edge into the sweet death of which she so desperately craved. After the third day, she had learnt not to scream. That alone seemed to excite the lich when nothing else did, so she remained silent. She was unable to stop the tears that escaped, and he marvelled over the inky black colouring of them. That prompted him to cut open her eyelids to study the ducts.
He was thrilled at her ability to survive, that he had to use tools to keep the flesh open even as it tried to stitch itself back together. And yet he seemed displeased.
"It's slowing!" he raged, some two weeks after the first day he had captured his new toy.
Turning on her, he gritted his teeth and glared. She could do nothing but look back at him, her arms outstretched, hanging from the chains once more. She had stopped trying to hold herself up, allowing the chains to keep her aloft.
He had hacked off her long hair, hopeful that it would grow back like the rest, yet it did not. He was too impatient to see that it grew nearly a foot in the week since.
"Why is it all slowing? You do not heal as fast. You grow weary faster. What..." he trailed off and blinked at her, studying. "You must eat." It was a cold statement, as though he were angry at her for being so weak as to need food. "Here I thought I had my equal, yet you are as weak as the humans," he sneered, resenting her ability to make him believe.
'Damn,' she thought, for she had been riding on starvation to bring her death. It would only have taken another week or so, with the rate her body was consuming energy. Normally able to survive two months between feedings if she was exceptionally careful, she was now lucky if she would see one. He was draining her of her energy, wasting it, and had not known. He was slowly killing her, all while trying to keep her alive with his extreme care.
"What do you eat? Your stomach does not connect to your digestive tract." He was not really talking to the hanging woman, merely thinking aloud.
The lich turned to his book, every detail of her physical being jotted out there. Flipping through the pages, he muttered profanity to himself and tapped a nail on the table. Finally, he paused on a diagram of her jaw, studying the teeth, and she was rather amused to realise that he had forgotten the circumstances of their meeting. He had completely forgotten that he had stumbled upon her consuming the elf. Had entirely forgotten some of the first questions he had asked her.
"You eat flesh…?" he wondered aloud, turning to study the limp form of the naked, bloody woman. In a flash, he turned and swept across to the door. Yanking it open, he spat at the startled guards who peeked in curiously.
Lifting her gaze, she met those of one of the guards, and his face paled. She could not really blame him. He would see nothing more than a pale woman, her right eye removed with blood staining her face, her torso cut open from navel to collarbones with her organs spread out onto a table before her like some morbid display, while she was very much alive and alert. Turning away, the man vomited on the ground.
"Bring me meat, all forms. Fresh and uncooked. Bring a human if we don't have human meat." Ignoring the retching guard, he slammed the door and turned back to his companion.
"Which do you prefer?" He began to laugh then, highly amused at his game as he approached her, and started putting her back together again, humming some merry tune while he tried to match the parts to the empty spaces in her torso.