abnormal tragedy

Chapter 31: isengard

An Uruk-hai stood in front of Rowan's cell and she became conscious of her surroundings. She was underground, perhaps hundreds of feet. If she looked past the creature, she could see furnaces and cauldrons. She smelled hot metal and could see from here the steam rising towards the far sky. The Uruk-hai commanded something to the orcs beside it and the cell door opened. Rowan tried to get past them but the Uruk-hai hit her hard, knocking her down. Rowan threw herself at the Uruk-hai who grasped Rowan by the throat and held her high. The creature hissed, "The White Wizard told us not to kill you, little ranger, but I will destroy you if you strike me again."

"I'd rather die than be a pawn of Saruman," Rowan spat. "You might as well do it now before I maim you." She sneered at the Orc. The Uruk-hai threw her down and kicked her ribs with his iron boots until Rowan cried out in pain. It left and locked the door again. Rowan tried to catch her breath but it hurt too much to breathe. She cried. She could hear screams throughout the cavern. Helplessly, she sat with her knees pressed against her chest and watched the world just beyond them, looking for some possibility of escape.

...

She woke the next morning, hands to her ears with her back pulled up against the cold damp wall of the cell. There was only a hint of natural light from the far sky but it was enough to help Rowan see her prison a bit more clearly. Her cell was a mere holding area built into the earth, a long thin walkway connecting it to other cells above and to the factory below. She could hear their infernal machines, the metallic ringing of weapons cast and shaped until they were ready to kill.

At first, Rowan had still been able to concentrate on the pain. The physical sensation of it: the impact, the sound the whip made before it struck her, the orcs' low laughter. She'd try to flinch away from the pain as much as possible, feel the hot burn where the rope chafed against her wrists, but there was no escape, and the whip kept falling down with cruel precision. Tears ran down her face and she sobbed between the strikes of the whip, desperately gulping down air, pulling and pulling at the rope that would not give until her wrists were rubbed raw and ached with the same agony as her bleeding back. "Don't kill her yet," she heard dimly through her rough, broken sobbing. "The wizard might want to talk to her again, in a week or two."

She wanted to beg, to promise to say anything, anything at all, whatever Saruman wanted to hear, but she was choking on her sobs and her tears and could not even breathe. Plus, she wouldn't go against her friends she promised her oath of allegiance to the Fellowship. She thought of her brother.. Legolas, her new friend Èowyn and of course Gimli as she continued to sob in the crammed corner of her cell. Rowan could only weep in humiliated exhaustion, even when they cut her loose so that her body fell to the ground. They laughed again when she tried to get up, a boot on her back forced her back to the ground, and there she remained, too weak to resist, unable to react to their taunts with anything but hopeless tears.

There was no escape. Not from Isengard, not from the orcs, not from the pain. In that moment, it seemed to her that this would be her entire life until the moment of her death, and as she lay on the cold ground, sharp stones bruising her cheek, Rowan prayed with what little reason remained to her that she would die soon, and quickly, and that those that might remember her would never know how she cried at the feet of orcs. Days, if they were days, seemed unending. Being kept in a tightly enclosed cell with barely any sunlight was causing Rowan to go mad, she was barely eating and couldn't wash or change her torn clothes. She thought to herself that if the Uruk-hai didn't kill her she would die of starvation and torture.