“Nik? Nik!” She screamed, frightened.

And he stirred. He breathed hoarsely, slowly and somehow awkwardly raised his hands to his throat; his fingers, finding a wide collar, suddenly to Karina’s horror, began to scratch it, as if in a desperate attempt to take it off. Claws scraped against the metal, he grabbed the edge of the collar at the very throat, thrust his fingers under it, and pulled down. It was useless and pointless, and probably even worse because of that – the way he in a helpless attempt tried to free his throat from the slave collar. How convulsively he twitched, trying to pull off the tightly welded collar, which couldn’t be removed, only sawed, and even then, this would obviously take more than one hour of time. Feeling the sealed seam, Nikto froze, staring with dead empty eyes at the sky. His face was distorted by a grimace of some kind of inhuman suffering and hopeless despair, he continued to languidly scratch the metal of the collar with his fingers, then suddenly opened his mouth and seemed to want to scream, but only a dull wheeze escaped from his throat. He wanted to scream, but he couln’t.

“Gods! He's a human now!” Flashed through Karina's head; The demon has lost control. Karina jumped to her brother, lifting him. He sat up, trembling, his mouth was open, but not a sound left his lips, although Karina was sure that he was screaming, screaming from pain and his unbearable condition. His empty blind eyes looked straight ahead and nowhere. His fingers let go of the collar limply. He grabbed his face with his hands, feeling himself the same way as then in the prison chamber, and these convulsive movements frightened Karina more than the Demon himself. Nikto bent over, as if he was about to vomit, grabbed his nose with his fingers, feeling for the rings, trying to unclench and pull out the apparently hated heavy jewelry. He managed to unbend and pull out only one thinnest ring. Blood flowed from the torn nostril. Karina got scared:

“Nik, don't do it! You can't pull it out! Special tools are needed! You will only cripple yourself! Don’t do it! These jewelry don’t disfigure you.” She hesitated, realizing that she was talking nonsense. She needed to somehow try to calm him down. To make him stop hurting himself. He hit himself in the head with his fists. She screamed. And suddenly he shuddered, as people usually shudder when they fall asleep. And he stared at her, and, apparently seeing her twisted face, immediately understood everything. He turned away, ripping the rag off his forearm. The wound healed completely, leaving only a white streak of light new skin on the tattoo. And Karina looked at his slave collar and thought that she saw him now in a completely different way. Nikto walked in it, never expressing or showing any inconvenience. He never touched it with his hands in an attempt to remove or adjust it.

He never jerked it with his hands. He slept, ate and drank in it, fucked in it, and for her it was some kind of a part of him. And only now she looked completely differently at this dubious decoration. She suddenly saw with all clarity how thick, wide and certainly heavy it was. She saw the inscriptions engraved on it, the date and place of the stamp, the serial number of the slave. A welded ring to which the chain was to be attached. The demon apparently didn’t care, but the human, her brother, suffered, the collar constrained the movements of his neck and prevented him from breathing. Nikto picked up the torn ring from the grass, took it into his mouth and, drooling to the touch, put it back in his nose, put a rag with the remnants of “sama” to the torn hole in his nostril, winced, but didn’t pass out.