Chapter 236: Survive
Survival was all they knew. It had been hell. Those left in the Duke’s Tower knew they couldn’t last for much longer.
They were all so emaciated, so slowed down by the poison that, even though they could look out the windows of the Duke’s Tower and see a camp forming as all the knights in the kingdom banded together to battle these monsters, there was nothing they could do to reach them.
How miserable it was to know that help was just outside of your reach. But they were too weak to yell, unable to run out of there themselves and not get slashed down by the monsters who had taken over the tower before.
They knew the monsters were different than before. The way they communicated with one another was perhaps one of the most alarming parts about them. If the people went down to the second level, they could hear the clicks of goblins talking to one another as if they knew what they were saying.
Clicks and shrill screams struck fear into the prisoners’ hearts each time they heard them. It was one of the many reasons the third floor became their haven.
Sir Phillip, Rosalind, and two other maids, Annie and Thyra, lived in squalor for months. Outside of the seasons changing, the only other indication of how long it had been was the marks on the wall in the Duke’s former quarters. They scratched into the wall with a dull knife they found discarded in the hallway.
The prisoners no longer considered who might live there in the future or if someone would have to deal with their mess eventually. It was hard to be considerate at all during those times.
They started updating the marks on the third day of living there, tallying it up in fives so that they could count how long it had been.
Sometimes, they weren’t sure if they even remembered to count it. There were likely days missed or too many days counted. From what they could tell, in only a couple of short months, it would be an entire year until their imprisonment had begun.
After a while, it became a bitter reality to look upon the marks. All they did was serve as a reminder that they were forgotten and as good as dead... Yet they somehow managed to keep surviving.
Survival was all they wanted, and yet all they did was grow weaker and weaker. It felt like they could all visualize their endings.