Chapter 152 - 153
The moment his foot crossed over the threshold of the cave mouth, he was assailed by the putrid scent of decayed flesh and rotten fruit, mixed in with the staleness of old urine and a festering of human excrement. Almost as soon as he entered, the blackness that had faced him mere moments ago now characterized the exit of the cave, as if nothing but an empty night’s sky lay beyond it. As soon as he made this distinction, all light disappeared from his eyes and he was stranded within an abyss of blackness.
Slowing for a second time, he summoned a small ball of fire and directed it to float in front of him like a living torch, at which point he finally saw the unknown speaker.
If the man weren’t struggling to crawl towards him, Alistar would have thought him a long-dead corpse. Even in Crystellum where the weaker slaves had regularly been forced into starvation by their fellow captives in the constant fight for additional food, he had never seen such an emaciated person before, alive or dead. The man’s naked body was little more than a shrivelled cloak of skin that clung to his skeleton in a nightmarish way, a few strands of loose, blond hair poking out of his liver-spotted head at random locations. And the eyes. With sockets so sunken that it seemed as if they contained nothing at all but a deep, festering shadow, Alistar could barely make out two little specks that seemed like nothing more than white raisins tied at the back with thin strands of dehydrated, fleshy string.
As Alistar stood there in the quiet of the cave, the man gradually stopped moving. Amidst the flickering ambience of the firelight, Alistar watched the still form for several minutes, observing no further changes.
Is he dead?
There was only one way to find out.
"H—hello?"
There was no response. He stood there for several moments, too nervous to approach any further. Soon enough, however, the man took a deep breath in the same manner as somebody that had just surfaced from the depths of a body of water after nearly drowning.
"Are you okay?"
The man began to stir.
"Is someone there? You...come back to torture me again? Or are you here to steal what little I have left? You tell your wretched master that I’m still here, that I haven’t—"