Chapter 1
She woke on the dirty cell floor, her body sore from laying on the hard floor all night. Her mouth tasted stale and her breath made her empty stomach turn. Aela looked around at her surroundings trying to re-orientate herself; there wasn't much to see. Just a small square cell with a stack of straw to one side for sleeping and a small waste bucket in the corner. She had initially tried to sleep on the straw but found that it poked right through her clothes and made her itch all over so she instead slept on the floor which was hard stone covered in a layer of dirt and filth. It smelled like sweat and pipe-smoke and made her think of all the other people who had also spent long nights in this confined space, a month ago she would never have believed that she would have been one of them; but here she was. The walls were equally as barren being made of dark brown bricks presumably made of mud long ago when the cell was built. A heavy iron door with thin slits cut into it sat directly in front of her locked from the outside and bolted to the wall. Torch light from the hall creating a striped pattern along the cell walls and floor. Aside from this there was no other light in the cell.
She stood up groaning and leaned up against the door, her small arms dangling out into the hall through the gaps. Now she could see into the hall, she vaguely remembered being dragged down through it the previous night and tried to remember the maze of corridors that led from the outside world to her current cell. The holding cells was a sprawling complex though and she was incredibly tired the previous night by the time she was led through the maze of halls, so all she could remember was the firm grips of the guards on her arms and the hallways spinning and curving as her feet dragged behind her. Continuing to try and remember the path began to make her head ache so she stopped. Besides, it's not like she would be able to engineer an escape from what lay ahead. Not even grown men who had escaped many a prison before had managed to escape the sprawling city prison of Dagorath.
Deciding that any farther thought of escape and the realization that it was all in vain would only drive her into a hope deprived depression, Aela turned around and slid her back down the door until she was sitting back on the floor. From here she just stared off into space and listened to the sound of another prisoner quietly chatting with someone. After a few moments she realized however that the other prisoner was the only other living being in the hall and that he was simply murmuring to himself. "Great." She thought "I'm stuck down here with a lunatic." She felt a sinking feeling when she remembered that many of the prisoners of Dagorath were mad as well. Her throat tightened and she felt a wave of despair crash over her, she massaged her wrist, thinking of why she was here. This however only made her more upset so she tried to occupy her mind by making patterns in the rough stone wall opposite her. The other prisoner continued speaking, saying things like "they don't know... They don't know about them. Crazy crazy people. They don't even know what they don't know...." Listening to the man speak in riddles Aela let a tiny, sad grin touch her lips. Even so her eyes began to water and she chocked out a sob. She held back the overwhelming desire she had to just break down and cry like an infant. She brought her knees up to her chest and buried her head in her sleeves, muffled sobs escaping her every so often and mixing with the other inmates chatter until his talking stopped and her lamenting was the only sound in the dim hall.
Meanwhile....
It was chilly that morning, a cold breeze swept in off the sea foreshadowing a storm that would be coming later in the week. The streets of the boardwalk were fairly crowded as people moved about to get to their jobs and begin work on their various tasks that day. Daelin pulled his long coat close around him, he had never liked the cold, so living in Dagorath was quite unpleasant for him for all but a select few days of he year. He had formerly lived in the warm dry region on the western edge of the Federation in the city Desert Gate just outside of the desert kingdom of Ak'had. He had not wanted to move from his home, but after he had gambled away his birthright and his father had passed he decided a change in scenery might be just what he needed to get his life back on track. Finding work was hard, but it turned out there wasn't much to be found aside from a few jobs that most of the population was above or too afraid to undertake. That's how he found himself as an Inquisitor of the city, Inquisitors were kind of like disposable policemen and investigators, and since he had barely passed the exam to join he was extra expendable. It was work though. Dangerous, low paying work where he often found himself dealing with people who would happily gut him for no other reason than his title.
Recently there was word from the lower level --the prison level-- of the city that there was some new crime syndicate that was stirring up the inmates. Usually no one would have cared, the whole purpose of building the city in two layers was so the better half of society could blissfully forget about the scum that was literally beneath their boots. However, there were some prisoners who were placed in there for only a short period, rather than the standard life-sentence, these prisoners were specially marked as protected and it was well known that if anything happened to these inmates the rest of the prisoners would all suffer the consequences. Daelin had no clue what those consequences could be, considering the prison was already the closest thing to hell he could think of; living out your life in eternal darkness and fear among the absolute worst of society. He guessed though that he and the prisoners would soon find out just how the wardens could make life worse down below, because this new syndicate had been killing prisoners marked as protected. At least that's what rumors had stated, for all Daelin knew it was just a few incredibly disturbed men who were responsible for these acts.
It had all started a few weeks ago early one morning when a couple was out for a walk near one of the few openings in the boardwalk that allowed citizens to look into the world below like some kind of zoo. They discovered two bodies hanging from the rafters, upon bringing the bodies in, a steel shackle used to mark one of the protected prisoners was discovered on one of the corpses. The dead man was later identified as the son of one of the prominent families who had disgraced his family name and was thrown below as a scare tactic, he was buried in the cemetery later that week. The other body was a girl who no one had ever seen before and must have been one of the children of the inmates and had spent her whole life below; she was thrown back down into the darkness after an hour.
No comments:
Post a Comment