Cerise stared at the Sorceress, horrified by what she’d just said. She was *stuck* like this? Forever!?
“Follow me,” said the Sorceress suddenly, turning and walking away.
“Hey, wait — !” cried Cerise, but the Sorceress was already gone, having started down a spiraling staircase that went down somewhere below the tower. Cerise stood still, startled. She waited a moment to see if the Sorceress would come back, but the Sorceress’s soft footsteps continued to get farther away.
Against her better judgment, Cerise trotted over to the staircase and looked down it. A line of torches lit the wall as it spiraled down, down, down into the depths, dimly-lit flickering dark blue stone on the right, infinite black depths on the left, and she could still just barely hear the Sorceress’s footsteps from deep in the bottom of the well somewhere. She shook her head. She wouldn’t have liked to go down there when she was human, and now she wasn’t sure if she even could, but the Sorceress didn’t seem to be coming back.
She took a deep breath and started down the stairs. They were comfortably wide enough, but they seemed to go on forever, and walking down stairs with two pairs of legs was harder than she’d expected. More than once she was terrified that she’d fall into the murky depths despite the width of the stairs, and she leaned against the wall to catch her balance. But she was even more worried the Sorceress would leave her behind, so she continued.
At last she reached the bottom. Looking up, there was no sign of the tower’s stone floor. She had to be hundreds of feet underground now. The ground here was rich, dark brown earth, and the Sorceress stood near the stairs, holding a torch overhead. Worms and lichens dotted the ground, and Cerise felt unnaturally cold.
“Come on,” she said, waving her hand. She turned and started down a long hallway, lined with the same blue stone as the tower. Here and there, a massive oaken door exited to — where? Cerise had no idea. The hall ended in a fork, and the Sorceress turned left, and then right at the end of the next.
“Where are we going?” said Cerise.
“I told you before,” said the Sorceress, “that if you wished to be freed, you’d allow me to cast a spell, which you did, and then you’d follow a simple order. In a moment, I will give you that order, and then you are free to go.”
“Really?” Cerise looked back over her shoulder at the horse body that trailed out behind her. “Free to go” didn’t seem quite as reasonable as when the Sorceress had first suggested it. Even if she were free, she was a freakish thing, neither a girl nor a horse. What village would dare take her in now?
The Sorceress turned again, and here the hallway widened and grew taller. On both sides, there were iron bars as far as the eye could see. The Sorceress snapped her fingers, and torches between each set of bars lit, and Cerise realized this was a dungeon, and the bars belonged to jail cells.
“You’re putting me in your dungeon!?” cried Cerise, taking a step back.
“Hardly,” said the Sorceress, looking back at her. “These are others who tried to steal from me. A few of them even did, before I caught up with them again. You won’t be in these cells; we have a deal, after all.”
“Then — why are we here?” said Cerise.
The Sorceress held up her hand, and a glowing blue-and-white ball lifted from it and floated in the air. “This orb will light on anyone here who I consider — viable,” she said. She pointed at the cages. “And so we come to my order: *Choose*. Choose someone to accompany you. He — or I suppose she, if you really were to swing that way — will be required to watch over you, and protect you, and build you a reasonable house and home for the next year, and then his — or, again, I suppose her — debt to me will be repaid.”
“You just want me to choose someone to help me?” said Cerise, confused.
“You’re my masterpiece, love. First of a new species! I can’t have you getting damaged, now, can I? You need a bodyguard, an associate, a partner. There are quite a few here who could serve that role. You just need to pick one.” The Sorceress grinned, and her sharp teeth flashed in the torchlight.
Cerise nodded. “Is that all?”
“That’s all!” said the Sorceress gleefully.
Cerise bit her lip, and started walking. The orb flew near her shoulder, and occasionally would dart toward a cell, illuminating the person inside as a possible candidate. A few hooted and hollered at the naked horse-girl walking by, and a few yelled at the Sorceress, but most looked up at her with resignation.