Arc 3: Chapter 23: Abyss
In the darkness, in the cold and the damp, my whole world contracted into a single thought, a single sensation, a single truth.
Pain.
Despite the Presider’s orders, the priorguard beat me for killing three of their own. The man I’d stabbed in the chest with Faen Orgis’s branch had died badly, sweating himself to death, and nothing the clerics could do with medicine or Art could save him. The cursed weapon’s od was too angry.
I learned this, and guessed the latter bit, because the ones who beat me half to death told me as they did it. Weak with dehydration, lack of food, and prior injuries, I hadn’t been able to fight back or defend myself.
I had cracked ribs as I lay in the dark of a filthy cell, possibly a fractured wrist. My nose had been broken, not for the first time in my life, and my whole body felt like a single throbbing bruise.
They’d taken my clothes, and given me an itching smock instead, threadbare and unwashed. It did nothing for the cold, and rubbed my skin raw.
I lay in the dark, wondering how I’d gotten myself here.
Not how. I knew what foolish decisions had brought me here. Why. What had it been for? For a quest I didn’t have to avoid dreaming to hide from? For agency over my life?
I’d grown arrogant. I’d forgotten I didn’t live in a time of legends anymore. I lived in a world of brutal consequence, and now I faced one.
I could only hope the people who’d made the mistake of getting close to me didn’t share in it.
“Got ourselves in deep this time, eh Al?”