Post by Widow on Jan 12, 2015 13:21:55 GMT
HP 100% | MP 0%
Heretic - Apprentice - Alchemist
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She knows that it is useless. But she can't suppress the impulse that wells up from within her own flesh.
She needs to do it—to hurl her entire body against the bars. It does no good at all. Her flesh simply bounces off the thick iron bars.
"Number 47! What the hell are you doing?" The guard's angry shout echoes down the corridor. The prisoners are never called by name, only by the numbers on their cells. Widow is Number 47.
Widow says nothing. Instead, she slams his shoulder against the bars. The massive bars of iron never nudge. All they do is leave a dull, heavy ache in Widow's superbly conditioned muscles and bones.
Now, instead of shouting again, the guard blows his whistle, and the other guard come running from their station.
"Number 47! What's it going to take to make you understand?"
"Do you want to be thrown into the punishment cell?"
"Don't look at me like that. Start resisting, and all it will get you is a longer time in here!"
Sitting on the floor of his cell, legs splayed out, Widow ignores the guards' shouts. She has been to the punishment room any number of times.
She knows she has been branded a "highly rebellious prisoner."
But she can't help herself. Something is squirming deep down inside her.
Some hot thing trapped inside there is seething and writhing.
"Some criminal you turned out to be!" says one guard. "You can't do shit in here. What's the matter, she devil? Can't do anything without an enemy staring you in the face?"
The guard next to him taunts Widow with laughter. "Too bad for you, buddy, no enemies in here? Nobody from your side, either. We've got you locked up all by yourself."
After the guards leave, Widow curls up on the floor, hugging her knees, eyes clamped tight.
All by myself— The guard was right. I thought I was used to living alone, in battle, on the road.
But the loneliness here in prison is deeper than any I've ever experienced before.
And more frightening.
Walls on three sides, and beyond the bars nothing but another wall enclosing the narrow corridor.
This dungeon was built so as to prevent prisoners from seeing each other, or even to sense each others' presence. The total lack of a change in the view paralyzes the sense of time as well.
Widow has no idea how many days have passed since she was thrown in here. Time flows on, that much is certain. But with nowhere to go, it simply stagnates inside her.
The true torture that prison inflicts on a man is neither to rob him of his freedom nor to force him to experience loneliness.
The real punishment is having to live where nothing ever moves in your field of view and time never flows.
The water in a river will never putrefy, but lock it in a jar and that is exactly what it will eventually do.
The same is true here.
Maybe parts of her deep down in her body and mind are already beginning to give off a rotten stench.
Because she is aware of this, Widow drags herself up from the floor again and slams herself into the bars over and over. There is not the remotest chance that doing so will break a bar. Nor does she think he can manage to escape this way.
Still, she does it repeatedly. She can't help herself. She has to do it again and again.
In the instant before his body smashes into that bar—for that split second—a puff of wind strikes her cheek. The unmoving air moves, if only for that brief interval.
The touch of the air is the one thing that gives Widow a fragmentary hint of the flow of time. The guards comes running, face grim with anger.
Now I can see human shapes where before there was only a wall.
That alone is enough to lift my spirits.
Don't these guards realize that?
"All right, Number 47, it's the punishment room for you! Let's see if three days in there will cool your head!"
Widow's lips relax into a smile when she hears the order.
Don't these guys get it?
Now my scenery will change. Time will start flowing again. I'm thankful for that.
Widow laughs aloud.
The guards tie her hand behind her, put chains on her ankles, and start for the punishment room.
"What the hell are you laughing at, Number 47?"
"Yeah, stop it! We'll punish you even more!"
But Widow just keeps on laughing; laughing at the top of her lungs.
If I fill my lungs with all new air, will the stench disappear?
Or have my body and mind rotted so much already that I can't get rid of the stench so easily?
How long will they keep me locked up in here?
When can I get out of here?
Will it be too late by then?
When everything has rotted away, will I become less a "woman" than an "it," the way our troops count enemy corpses?
--------
Three days later....
"Stop this! Please, I beg of you! Let me go!" A young man's screams echo through the emptiness. No voice answers him.
Crouching in the darkness, Widow counts the footsteps. Three men have come in. The disorderly footsteps probably belong to the young man. The other two are perfectly regular.
"Please, I'm begging you. If it's money you want, I'll get you all you could ask for on the outside. I promise. I won't forget to show my thanks to you. Please!" The only reply of the two men who have brought the young one here is the clunk of an iron lock opening. "No! No! Please, I'm begging you. I'll do anything you want. Anything!" A dull thud is the sound of flesh tearing, bone wrenching. Someone collapses on the floor.
A strangled scream.
The clunk of an iron lock closing.
Widow knows the young man has been thrown into the shell diagonally opposite his own. When you are locked into one of these windowless cells, your hearing becomes acutely sensitive.
"Don't do this! Let me out of here! Please! Let me out of here!" From the sound of the voice, Widow can imagine a young man's face with boyish traces: a small-time hoodlum hardly a step above a teenage gang member. When he was still on the streets, no doubt, he used to swagger down the sidewalk, his cunning but cowardly eyes darting every which way. The two men who brought him here maintain their silence to the end, their footsteps moving off together.
The heavy door opens and closes again. Left alone in the darkness, the young man howls his entreaties for a time, but when he realizes they will do no good, he shouts himself hoarse, spitting out one curse after another until he begins to sob.
"Quiet down there," an old rogue heretic calls out from one of the inner cells, "It won't do you any good to make a fuss, Time to give up, sonny."
This is the voice of the oldest man living in the dozen or so shells lined up in the darkness. He was already here when Widow was sent to this place. It is always his role to quiet and comfort the obstreperous newcomers. "If you've got time to bawl like that, keep your eyes closed!" "Huh?" "Just make sure you keep sucking on your memories of the outside-like a piece of candy!"
Sounds of suppressed laugher come from the surrounding shells.
Widow joins in with a smile and a sigh.
All the cells in the dark are supposedly full, but few of their inhabitants are laughing. Most of them have lost the strength to laugh.
"Hey, sonny." the old man continues in his role as adviser to the newcomer, "No point making a fuss. Just calm down and accept your fate. Otherwise..." and here a note of intensity enters the old man's voice, "they'll just drag you out of here feet first." This is exactly what happened yesterday to the former inhabitant of the young man's cell.
He had been screaming on and off for a day. Then came a day of banging his head against the cell wall. Then nothing... until he was dragged out in silence.
"So get a hold of yourself, sonny. Don't let the darkness swallow you up. Close your eyes and imagine nice scenery from the outside, the bigger the better: the ocean, or the sky, or some huge field of grass. Remember! Imagine! that's the only way to survive this place."
This was the advice he always gave to the newcomers.
But the young man screamed tearfully.
"Who the hell do you think you're kidding? Survive this place? And then what? I know what this place is. Cidna mine! 'No exit' prison! They throw the lifers in here, give them just enough food to keep them alive, and in the end they kick the bucket anyway—Am I right? There's nothing left to hope for." His shouts turn to sobs again.
This is the reaction of most of the newcomers.
Nor are they mistaken.
This is a prison.
A solitary cell with bars, and the sun shines on a prisoner only on the day of his funeral...
"Everybody dies, sonny, that's for sure. You just can’t let your mind go before your body does. Hope doesn't have to fade unless you throw it out yourself," the old man goes on softly. Then he adds with feeling, "This system we live under can't last much longer, either."
The old Half-Alv is a political prisoner. As leader of the anti-government faction, he long resisted the Stratford Wardens until he finally lost the struggle and was imprisoned.
The young man has no ears for the old man's words, however, he continues thrashing on the floor and crying. This fellow won't be in his cell much longer than his predecessor. In a few days, or in less than a month at best, he will go to pieces.
The darkness is that powerful. Depriving a prisoner of light is far crueler than taking his life in an instant.
"My my," the old man reflects, "This fellow's not going to do us much good in a prison break." The old revolutionary laughs, it might be a genuine laugh of a bold front, but in any case almost no one laughs in response.
Tomorrow morning- or rather, since there is no clear-cut "morning" in the darkness- after they go to sleep, wake up and have their next meal, another cold corpse will be dragged out wordlessly from another cell.
"Hey, listen. How many of us are here now?" the old revolutionary asks. "Answer if you can hear me!"
It hurts. Another woman’s head – it was like a drum, throbbing to a painful beat as she tried to quell the wave of nausea. What exactly had happened? There was a gap in her memory – she had come to Avon to… steal something. That much she was sure of. Everything afterwards was a blur – there had been shouting, a slur of voices she couldn't quite decipher yet, and somehow she had ended up on the floor before everything went black. She traced her jaw line, wincing as her fingers brushed a tender bruise. Something violent, and instead of being killed, she was here. A prison.
There was no obvious way out, and she disappointingly had no lockpick. Could she perhaps lift the keys off of the guards? Only if they were stupid enough to patrol that close to her cell, fall for a ploy, or carry it on their person. She heaved a small sigh – first visit to Avon, and this is what happens. They even took away all of her belongings, leaving her in threadbare shirt and pants. There were no shoes, and she was sure whoever changed her out of her clothes wasn't a woman. She wouldn't have felt so violated otherwise. So much for preserving her dignity. Bastards.
"I hate Avon," she muttered darkly, eyes closing in a feeble attempt to subdue her headache.
There were voices in the background, but she wasn't really listening. The word 'die' was repeated far too many times for liking, though, and her attention was eventually piqued somewhere along the way.
"Hey listen," she heard. "How many of us are here now? Answer if you can hear me!"
An old man from the sound of it. She briefly wondered why an old geezer would be sitting in the stir with the rest of the rabble before dismissing the thought as irrelevant.
"It's a bit difficult to count how many," the other girl quipped, deciding to answer. "Seeing as I can't even see anyone, that makes it all the more challenging."
"I can hear you," Widow says solemnly.
Hers is the only other voice.
She hears the disappointed groans of another inmate.
A new feminine voice brought a short-lived comfort to Widow.
"Welcome to Cidna Mines, lass: A dead man's wonderland...or a miner's paradise if you want to be bright about it. We don't get women in Cidna too often. Now what could you be in here for? You must have done something pretty naughty..." Widow inquired, trying to gain knowledge about the new prospect.
"Nothing like what you're thinking," the other woman replied to the disembodied voice. The place had terrible acoustics, she decided, using her observations as a means of distraction from his condemnation. "I don't plan to become part of this wonderland. I've escaped before, and I'll escape again," she said boldly. "I have to," she added softly.
If she could get a lockpick – something that resembles it at least, then… What about getting the keys instead? She'd have to listen for the tattle-tale noise of jingling keys the next time the guards made their rounds. Perhaps they were of the stupid kind; that would make everything so much easier.
If she was able to leave her cell, there were too many guards and handling trained men was not her specialty. Suppose if she could stick to the shadows and bypass all of them, where would she go? She'd been unconscious when they had locked her up. There was no way for her to know the way out other than aimlessly wandering until an exit made itself known.
"Man, this is bad, we were full up a little while ago."
The old man gives a dry chuckle.
Widow asks, "I wonder if something's happened out there?"
"Maybe so," answers the old revolutionary.
"If you ask me, this would be about the right time for a coup d'etat or a revolution."
"My 'boys' aren't going to keep quiet much longer..." The old man remarked.
"Uh, what did they call you again? Elizabeth Hightower of Stros M'kai? I guess you'll just have to settle for Liz. Word out there is that you ran a pretty extensive large-scale independent crime syndicate... Oh that's right! The Maidens of Misfortune! Pretty dangerous lot. I heard about you and your kind in the Moon Dance Forest. Ran the thieves guilds out of business there if I remember correctly. Even hear that you were the one that offed that rich noble, Alexander Von Drake! I wonder how a woman like you manage to pull a stunt off like that. Anyways, have you noticed what's happening? How there used to be a lot more guys getting thrown in here until a little while ago, and most of them real nobodies, not worth sentencing to life?"
"Uh-huh, sure..." Widow mumbled, seemigly uninterested.
The young man was one of them- nothing but a small-time crook. It just so happened that the storehouse he broke into belonged to a rich man with ties to a powerful politician. This was the only reason they put him in a cell.
"The cells always used to be full. They would throw a bunch of men in here and they would die, then the new men would come,
and they would die..."
The young man was one of those, the terror of being enveloped in darkness was too much for him, and he went to pieces.
He was apparently having hallucinations at the end: "I'm coming Mama, I'm coming. Wait for me, please, Mama..." he repeated over and over like a child. "Where are you, Mama? Here? Are you here?" and he gouged his own eyes out with his bare hands.
"I figured things were getting scary out there. The guards losing control...rumors of the Heretics murdering innocents in Londiminium...so Cyros Inthan was really starting to crack down- which is why these cells were always full."
This is what brought the young man here. Blood streaming from his eye sockets, he died muttering in snatches, "What did I do? Everybody knows damn well... there are plenty of men way worse than me..."
"But now the place is empty. Do you know what that means, Widow?"
"Sure. There's so much crime out there now that the government can't suppress it."
"You got it; the whole royal family might be strung up by now for all we know. Its a revolution. It will happen any day now! That means you and I will get out of here. The Nightshade will come and get us. Malfius would never leave behind an old shield-brother! Just hang in there a little while longer."
Widow nods in silence. The old revolutionary goes on, "You're strong, Widow. Not many guys could stay as calm as you, thrown into a shell and enveloped in darkness like this."
Not even Widow can explain it. It is true that she was strangely calm now when they put him back in the cell. The darkness was something she seemed to recognize as a distant memory. In the distant past, she, too, may have tasted the anguish of the other cell inhabitants so tortured by the fear of being sealed in darkness.
"How are you so tough mentally, Widow? Does it mean you, too, are a revolutionary?"
"No, not me..."
Her crime is hardly worth talking about. She resisted somewhat under questioning when they brought her in as a suspect for the murder of a nobleman, Alexander Von Drake, and for that he was branded a rebel and thrown into a cell. A slap to her pride as a seasoned criminal. The old man is probably right, though. The country's dictatorship is almost certainly in its last days.
"It won't be long now. We'll be back in the real world before we know it. I have hope right in here, and it will stay here until I abandon it myself," the old revolutionary mutters as if trying to convince himself. "We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope."
"When the world says give up, hope has a funny way of whispering try one more time..." Widow chuckles faintly.
Somewhere close by a guard shouts "Quiet down down there! Your constant banter is giving me a headache. There's no hope for any of you criminal scum, so I don't want to hear any of your moaning. If you haven't learned after all this time, perhaps you'll never realize the truth: No one escapes Cidna Mine..."
"No one escapes Cidna Mine," the other woman heard, temporarily torn from her musings. It sounded too confident to be a prisoner. There must be a guard somewhere around here.
She strained her ears to see if she could hear him walking, and thus, be able to make out the sound of keys.
To escape Cidna Mine would be like trying to penetrate and impregnable fortress with a handful of men.
This much was true however.
Despite any false senses of hope they may transpire in their heart. History dictates that even Cidna Mine was simply a pro-longed death sentence and and profitable means of slave labor.
But then again...
History is written by the victor.
and every moment of resistance now was a prelude to victory later.
"Despair and frustration will not shake our belief that the resistance is the only way of liberation. But now with the living conditions deteriorating, and with the sure knowledge that we are slated for destruction, we have been transformed into an implacable army of liberation...don't they know that?" Widow whispered shallowly to her brothers and sisters in bondage.
Thoughts of freedom...
Sincere ambitions towards liberation...
All equally futile.
Widow had heard it all before. Inmates coming in and out, voicing words of planned escape attempts.
Many have tried, few managed to make a break for it, only to receive a swift arrow to the back or a sword lunged in the belly, ripping out his insides. Then they'd send in a few guards to come clean up the mess.
The security in Cidna Mines was too tight.
Even if they did release themselves from their shackles..they'd still have a legion of well trained armored guards in the buffer zone between imprisonment and salvation.
It was common for people to talk of venturing to the outside. Especially from newcomers.
She was one of them from the bits and pieces Widow could infer from her comment.
Anyone naive enough to think they could escape Cidna Mine on their own was definitely fresh meat.
Her voice sharp, like a nail, she spoke harshly in a dark manner only acquired through many rough years as a time-worn convict in prison could muster, hoping to hammer in some sense into the newcomer as to make her realize just where she was exactly.
"You've never been to Avon, have you? That's big talk coming from someone who hasn't lasted more than three days here. I spent years in Cidna mines. In the dark...it's a hellhole. Covered in raw sewage. Guards breaking some inmates fingers with a warhammer just out of pure neeping meanness. Men die of starvation here all the time. I saw a guy in the opposite cell catch a skeever with his teeth, because they binded his hands behind his back twentyfour hours a day for two months, he couldn't eat. Seeing someone do that...He was weeping when they crushed it to death in his mouth. Seeing his eyes, his face...it's madness. He was dead three days later."
"What killed him?" The old withering man asked.
Widow paused for a brief moment, then stated his words frostbit with malice, followed by a dim chuckle as the realized the dry humor of what he just said.
"Realization of what he'd turn into..."
"That was him; I am me," she replied. "I am not going to die here, and if you're content on wasting the rest of your days here, that's your prerogative."
There has to be a way out, she thought to herself. The only inescapable prison was death, and so long as it did not claim her, she would not be bound by it. Despair was something she hoped she would never feel again, and she would not feel it now. Yeah, it was dark, and she was alone - but she could still fog a mirror. That's all that really mattered, because what naturally followed was her desire to break free.
"I aim to leave with or without help."
At the very least, the plotting would do much to stay her sanity.
"Don't mistake my patience for contentment. The one who thinks it can't be done counts the risk, not the reward. It seems to be a law of nature, both inflexible and inexorable, that those who will not risk cannot win. In the lottery of life, there's two kind's of people in life: winners and losers. You're obviously not a loser. Neither am I. I'm certain we can help each other get what we want. This isn't something to take lightly. I've watched other peoples' attempts and learned from their mistakes. This isn't a one man operation. I've learned that much. If you're going to play the game, you better know the rules, love. For now, just make yourself comfortable. We may be in here together for a few weeks at best. Things like this take time..you start to rush and underestimate what lies ahead and you'll end up getting yourself killed. For now study the layout, observe the guards movements. Take notice of their patrol patterns. Carve them into your mind as if your life depended on it..because trust me. It will..."
She rested his head against the wall, his eyes scanning the void of the darkness.
Droplets of water cascaded from the ceiling.
It wouldn't be long before the floor of his cell would be blanketed with a light flood.
"You're a pretty smart girl. How'd you get involved in fencing in the first place?" The old man questioned curiously, interrupting Widow's peace.
"Back in the Navy, we delivered weapons all over Gaia. Dropping off guys with twenty crates of axes for the local fighters, so they could knock over some Avon dictator. Mind you that's not twenty crates of iron fashioned by military blacksmiths. These were illicit weapons. Confiscated in some raid and then redistributed. No paperwork right? If a crate here or there goes missing, hey, it happens. Military teaches you two things: how to deal with bureaucracy, and how to avoid it. Learning how to avoid it means learning how to deal in fencing. You muster out, you apply what you learned. Every fence I ever met started that way...losing illicit weapons in transport with national militaries."
Widow was rather enthusiastic about enlightening the curious old man on how the system worked.
"Where do you get the weapons?"
"It was a romantic notion they they all came out of Londiminium after the Great War with the Alvs and the rest of mankind. I move weapons, I profit from circulation. You get a peace treaty with one of the Greater Kingdoms. Both sides disarm. You think they slag two thousand tons of weapons? No, they sell them to me. I resell them wherever the next war is starting."
"Those weapons are from the great war?"
"Well, mostly half. The rest come from old armies of Londiminium and the old Imperial armies during the Crisis, after they abandoned their colonies when a new dictator moved in during the Third Era. You know."
"So some of these weapons are very old? They've bee bought and sold repeatedly?"
"They're not bio-degradable. Only the dead are bio-degradeable..."
Widow silently watches a rat scurry across the outskirts of her cell.
"Why Avon? People need weapons all over Gaia. Why here, Why my home?"
"Every place is somebodies home pal, but it doesn't stop people from going to war. I don't start wars. I didn't start this one. It seems like it's your fellow Heretics who want each other dead. Besides...why should I give a shit about your home? Why should anyone else? So there's someone's home you don't give a shit about?"
"What if it were your home?"
"War is my home...."
Widow shrugged off the webs of morality sewing themselves over her. She knew the desire to satisfy her own greed was abstract in detail. He could help but find some deep inner truth in her words.
"Did you ever choose sides in a conflict?"
"I did it once. It was a bad idea. Cut my profits in half, almost got me killed. Never again. You sell to both sides. Stabilize the market, draw out the conflict and make more money. A big sale to one side doesn't generate repeat business. Both kingdoms are using my weapons. Now their in detente. Both sides are stockpiling. Less violence, more spending. It's perfect."
"But it's anarchy, Thousands are dead, hundreds of thousands are displaced."
"If I pick sides, fewer will be displaced, but more will be dead. And I will probably be one of them."
"You think someone in the Londiminium is going to come after me? Shit no! I'm a necessary evil. They want me here. Because if I wasn't, they might have to come and try to stem the tide. It would be thankless and worthless. And once the bodies start coming home in bags, they're screwed. A dead 31 year old woman from Stros M’kai gets more publicity than the deaths of hundreds of men who gave their lives to protect. So even if they did give a shit, they're own government prevents them from taking action."
Widow took pleasure in expressing that through her greed, he still managed to benefit society.
"You see these Londiminium boys or these Avon kids, or whoever is listening to all the bullshit the town criers put out. General Arangalion, Ashe Crimson, I can't even remember who, because what's the difference. Glassy-eyed little shits shouting in support of whatever, propaganda, lies, bullshit's being spouted at them. It's absurd. In war, truth is the first casualty. These guys are already dead. They're hacking each other to bits for someone else's...for someone else. Arangalion, Ashe, Royal Guard, Wardens...there's no popular resistance at all. There isn't eve a genuine desire to defeat the Heretics. There's no sense in it, no sense in it at all. What would it matter if the Heretics butchered the lot of them? Would it change anything?"
Widow quips, shaking her head at the delusion of mankind.
"I saw a firefight a few years back. A little skirmish broke out at this farm when some legion boys got lost in the wilderness. Maybe five or six of them. Trading fire with the Wardens patrolling the area. Went on for twenty minutes. Guys popping up from behind rocks to fire a volley of arrows, you know, randomly at each other. All of them almost too afraid to die. When it was over, the two lWardens who were unhurt ended up running off in the woods, terrified. I went down and had a look around. A guy had been shot through the stomach. Bloody mess. He saw me and whimpered to me to finish him off. Funny, how guys get shot because they're too afraid to die, and they're lying there dying and they're too afraid to live. Idiots." Her voice was bitter, and had no ounce of remorse whatsoever.
"Saw this Warden kid a bit further into the forest. Couldn't have been eighteen...seventeen. He had a war axe across his lap, and a dead legionnaire, half in the ditch next to him. A couple of swings with that steel war axe tore big chunks of hamburger out of his torso. The kid was lifting up the guy's leg, taking his boots. Kid just looked tired..just beaten down, ragged, tired, old. A kid that age shouldn't look like that. I sold him some drugs at a discount to ease his mind."
Widow stared blankly at a wall, the figure of the young boy indulging in the sweet sentiments of refined moon sugar as it destroyed her mind was not far by any means.
She blinked. Breaking free from her hallucinations. She could tell her personal demons were starting to catch up to her, but she would continue to evade them.
"Why drugs? Why not Ale, mead?"
"What's the difference, same job really. You get up, you get dressed, you meet your clients, you discuss a fair price. You make a delivery and receive payment. Sounds boring, but it's not. it's just....simple. I'm doing what men have been doing for hundreds of years...trading one thing for another. If it's you who wants to attach morality to it, make it evil...insane. People aren't asking for riches, they just want a little encouragement to get through the day. I provide that courage.”
"Is it true you've been selling drugs in bulk. How'd you manage to pull off a stunt like that?"
"Getting them in is easy. With the help of the Maidens of Misfortune, I brought them in over the mountain, through the desert, whatever. The hard part is moving them inside the country. Whenever you get stopped, you got to bribe someone or kill someone and it's not good for business. No, once you're inside you want to hand off as quick as possible. Let the customer deal with it."
"How do they move a shipment?"
"I delivered three hundred vials of Polaris's purest refined Draguma with the help of the Gypsy caravans. Ri'saad showed up with a dozen of his men, dead men. He packed Draguma into the corpses they reanimated with necromancy, figured no one would search them. Smart guy."
"Have you ever refused to sell Draguma to anybody?"
"I'm a humanist. I don't judge. Maybe you would."
"I couldn't sell Draguma."
"Bullshit, old man. You have all the skills to be a Draguma dealer. Better one than me even. You're smart, you're creative, you're a salesman. You sold me on answering these dumb questions. Man, the rest is just paperwork."
"I mean, I'd be unable, psychologically to sell Draguma."
"I'm talking facts and you're talking theory. You're not a good person, old man, you've just been lucky enough. You've never had to be otherwise. When it comes down to it, what a man can do is what he he will do. But believe what you want."
"Who gets the lion's share, that's what it's all about. Whether it's been between children, animals or warlords. It's not that everyone wants a piece, it's that everyone wants the biggest piece. And the biggest piece doesn't go to the monkey or the giraffe. The biggest piece goes to the lion. Because the Lion is the neeping king! That's how it works. It worked that way in the first era before men were saying otherwise. That's probably how it should work.”
"But you're not the lion. They call you The Jackal of Stros M'kai."
Widow couldn't help but smile, lost in that notorious flicker of a grin.
"Shh..sometimes the jackal steals the lions share. But don't tell anyone..."
The girl in the other cell wondered about his jail-breaking records. Widow seemed rather used to the role of playing prisoner; perhaps she had been in here. That would explain the fervor with which she voice held.
It was a voice of someone who had seen the worst side of life and had convinced themselves there was nothing to be had but garnering self-satisfaction, to seek pleasure in such a way that the horrid world would not matter so long as they found their own happiness. It was selfish, but who was she to call the kettle black?
She listened to Widow speak and found herself amused at just how talkative she was in sharing her ideals and thoughts to an old man she couldn't even see. Normally, it would be the elderly preaching the young about how life really was, but the roles here were reversed. It was crazy, and she did not expect any better out of a prison.
They had a tendency to become a madhouse as they were a place of rusted chains and dashed hopes.
Widow spoke of Stros M’kai, and she was suddenly drawn back to a home lost. The southern regions had taken the brunt of the damage, and to this day, she could still remember the magical flames still burning.
That hadn't been her house then – not her family immolated by the fires of war, but still, she vividly remembered how she watched so closely despite her youth
. If the day had come again, would the fascination for the abomination remain or would there be muted apathy?
She gripped her shoulder tightly, reminiscing in the darkness for a moment.
Her work kept her busy, and her leisure time was spent being merry. There was rarely a chance to sit and just think. She had to be moving – keeping momentum as life went on and on and on. Thinking about yesterday only served to slow her down. She tried not to dwell, and yet, she found she could not help it if not for the fact that it reminded her who she was and how she came to be.
There were sinners and saints, but having lost the saints and suffered from sinners – how different would she have been had it not been the way it was?
She could have speculated for the rest of her days and never derive an answer to the impossible question.
She had to make do with what life had given her, and it was simply economical to try to make the most out of little.
So she got back on track noted to herself what she needed to look out for. The other Elf had advised her to remember the guard patrols, but she had neglected to indicate what sort of opportunities was available to them to exploit.
When would be a good time to make an escape?
Where would that be?
If it were somewhere else, learning the routes here would potentially prove fruitless. What was the place like past these bars?
"Hey – is there ever a moment when we leave our cells?" Besides being dead, she mentally added.
Widow contemplated deeply on the fact that the girl most likely hasn't even seen the area outside her cell. Which also meant, she didn't know how the prisoners operated in Cidna Mine.
She makes a wrong move and their both dead.
Guilty by association were the laws of the Heretics and he doubted they it would take them long to see a pair of Heretics and connect the dots that they had been associating with each other in one form or another.
Before she could answer, the clanking of steel on wooden surface echoed through the halls.
A quartet of Stratford Wardens arrived at the scene, led by Aincrad, a fierce female Half-Alv that was fully armored much like the rest of her men.
"All right meat, rise and shine buttercup! You're in Cidna Mine now , number 52, which means your ass belongs to me! I hope you love choking on ore, because from now on you're going to be puking silver ingots! You understand me?" She boasted vainly.
"Fifty-two?" the other girl had repeated softly. Anger simmered underneath – her pride glowered as it was deemed nothing more than a simple number. She had it in her mind to respond with a vicious retort, but-
Before the girl could respond with any form of resistance, Widow quickly interrupted.
"Don't worry about the newcomer Aincrad, she probably doesn't even know how to work a pickaxe, I'll show her the ropes."
Aincrad would typically not be too partial to the idea of an inmate being too close to another, but Widow never had any records of attempting escape, so she believed she knew her place in the world.
The other woman cast Aincrad a sidelong glance and found her senses. To the eyes of the guards, she was nothing more than a tool – made to be used and then thrown away, and as it was, the tools were almost always first to suffer the wrath of its master. She had no intention of being broken, and so she set her eyes on the ground, affixing her attention to a rock so that her temper may cool.
"Yeah, well she just better be shitting silver when I get back..."
Aincrad said as she opened their cells with all the guards brandishing their weapons.
She contemplated Aincrad's warning as she thrust her key into the locks of their cells. The woman looked up – seeing freedom around Aincrad's neck. The Half-Alv noticed. She smirked, dangling it in front of the Heretic's eyes as she sneered.
"And don't even think you'll be getting your pretty paws on this..."
She added showing off the key to the cell that she so happily wore on her necklace, as to always keep it within sight and away from deft hands.
She left with her trio of armsmen and locked the gate leading to Avon.
"Phew...that was a close one...well now that we're out it looks like you have the answer to your question. Best I show you how things work in here now before you get yourself in a shitty predicament, you can't get yourself out of. First things first, as you know this is a dog-eat-dog world. You make the mistake of pissing off the wrong inmate and you might end up dead. As much as I'd love to be there for your funeral, I'd have to pass because I'd might just have to attend my own as well. So what you're going to need is a weapon, you familiar with shivs? You make the right contacts in this place and you can get yourself a nice weapon, but of course you know as well as I do that it's all about the art of the barter. Unfortunately there's no haggling an inmate like a shopkeeper. You don't get something for nothing. You're going to have to put some work in. Now let's hurry up and grab a pickaxe before the guards get suspicious."
Widow made her way down the wooden platform where a pair of pickaxes lie.
She detested the feeling of copper metal on her skin before, but now it seemed that he had grown accustomed to it over the years. Hier face was melancholy and weary, but she managed to keep a calm demeanor.
"Oh..and I'd advise you not to go getting any bright ideas about swinging those pickaxes at any guards...it's not the first time someones got that idea and then they soon get the life lesson that copper isn't sharper than steel."
----------
"Don't worry about the newcomer Urzaga, she probably doesn't even know how to work a pickaxe; I'll show her the ropes."
"Yeah, well she just better be shitting silver when I get back," the Orc warned, thrusting her key into the locks of their cells. The woman looked up – seeing freedom around Aincrad's neck. The Half-Alv noticed. She smirked, dangling it in front of the Heretic's eyes as she sneered. "And don't even think you'll be getting your pretty paws on this."
The caged thief gritted her teeth but said nothing. Their jailor and her entourage left, leaving the two alone and trapped in the mine.
Widow spoke: "Phew...that was a close one...well now that we're out it looks like you have the answer to your question. Best I show you how things work in here now before you get yourself in a shitty predicament, you can't get yourself out of. First things first, as you know this is a dog-eat-dog world. You make the mistake of pissing off the wrong inmate and you might end up dead. As much as I'd love to be there for your funeral, I'd have to pass because I'd might just have to attend my own as well. So what you're going to need is a weapon, you familiar with shivs?"
She nodded, following her kinsman down into the belly of the mine. She had to handle a few blades in the pocket-probing business. Her kind weren't called cutpurses without reason.
"You make the right contacts in this place and you can get yourself a nice weapon, but of course you know as well as I do that it's all about the art of the barter. Unfortunately there's no haggling an inmate like a shopkeeper. You don't get something for nothing. You're going to have to put some work in. Now let's hurry up and grab a pickaxe before the guards get suspicious."
Widow grabbed a pickaxe, and likewise, she took one as well. It was heavier than she expected – but then again, she had never wielded anything she thought as cumbersome. They'd clink too much, and a noisy thief was a dead one.
Would she have to swing this thing all day?
The very thought of it fatigued her mind.
"Oh… and I'd advise you not to go getting any bright ideas about swinging those pickaxes at any guards...it's not the first time someone's got that idea and then they soon get the life lesson that copper isn't sharper than steel."
The voice resonated back in her mind as she stared at the pick axe in her hand.
"I hear you," she said, following after Widow. "I don't fancy the quickest way out – it's a tad too permanent for my liking." She stared hard at a stone wall – almost sure she could make out a dull gleam. Perhaps there. "You mentioned contacts…? What sort of work are we talking?"
"The kind of work that gets us some proper protection. We can't rely on our magics here. You see those emerald jewels locked around your wrists, they aren't fashion accesories. They are called Miasma inhibitors. Using any form of corruption spells if pretty much null and void. It will just cancel it out." Widow replied with a grim expression as she mined ore.
INVENTORY
EQUIPMENT: Starter Cloth Armor, Starter Longsword, Starter LongswordABILITIES USED: [None]
Words: 7,500
Post Theme Song: Master of Shadows
TAGS:
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