It started with a girl. One he had seen many months past, and only for a few evenings.>

Her father, as it turned out, was a barbaric maniac, straight out of the foulest dungeons of the Middle Ages. Decades into the twenty-first century, the madman seemed terribly out of place.

The torturers had considered every possibility and taken every measure to assure their success. Not even death would offer their victims an escape. No harm would come to their bodies, of course. Only their minds.

For the first sixteen, the project succeeded. But the seventeenth was different. The seventeenth was Dark.