PRISONER: A Paranormal Yaoi Romance

1

Daeron has been in the arena all day. No food to eat. No food for days before that. How many, he has forgotten. He’s hungry and he wants to be fed. He wonders when they will feed him and let him go back to his pit and its soft, soothing darkness. The floor of the arena is littered with bodies.

Their blood is soaking into the sand. The screams of the Watchers ring in his ears until it is just a hum of noise. Daeron looks around curiously, but there is nothing left to kill. He has killed everything. This is good because no one is left to attack him and it is safe to feed. Now all of his opponents are just meat. He sinks his teeth into a nearby leg, ripping through it with his sharp teeth until they connect with bone.

His strong jaw snaps the femur with a satisfying ‘crunch’. Blood is still rushing in the barely-dead body and it spurts out in a satisfying gush. It is like taking a bite of a ripe plum. The meat is firm and juicy in his mouth and he enjoys the simple pleasure. He gets very few. Ravenous, he takes one bite and then another and another and another until the body is all gone.

The bones sit heavy in his stomach, but he is still hungry. It seems he is always hungry. He moves to the next body and does the same, macerating and eviscerating the hot flesh in his teeth, gnawing on the bones and sometimes swallowing them whole. The Watchers are going wild around him.

Their bloodlust is fueled by the mutilation of the dead. Daeron does not notice, nor does he care. He does not kill for them. His reasons are simple: he kills because he does not wish to be killed and he eats because he does not wish to die. He has no purpose other than that and he certainly does not think too hard about what he eats.

Dead is dead and meat is meat. After the third body is devoured, the arena rumbles and the stone rolls away to reveal a pitch black opening toward which Daeron’s enormous body moves. He goes not because he is forced, but because that is where he prefers to be. His world consists of only the arena and the pit. The arena is where bad things happen and people scream, but it is dark and quiet in the pit. The pit belongs to Daeron. No one ever bothers him there. The stone rolls back behind him and the silence washes over him like a cleansing rain. His golden eyes quickly adjust to the almost total darkness.

He is at the bottom of a deep round hole. The walls are made of polished stone and always seem to be wet. They are much too slippery to climb. He knows he has tried, though he can’t remember when. It seems like hard work and what is the point in trying to escape his home? Daeron’s slow, sluggish mind can’t comprehend what might lay beyond the pit. He knew once… but he can’t remember anymore. What little light there is comes from the top of the hole. As large as Daeron is, it is far, far above his head.

It is from there that he is usually fed. No one ever comes into the pit. They just throw the meat down at him. Usually it’s dead carcasses that splatter at the bottom, but sometimes not. Sometimes the food screams the whole way down and then splatters. Daeron does not care. He will lick the mess up off the floor. Meat is meat. It shouldn’t go to waste. He settles on the floor with a groan. He is injured. Muscles are torn, skin is missing, bones are broken. One of his eyes is scratched and it burns. He hurts.

He hurts badly, but there is nothing for it, but time. It will heal. It always does. He closes his eyes and wills the pain away. It works, mostly. Enough for him to doze off and that is all he wants to do- to slumber in the dark and sleep away the days and the months and the years that pass by endlessly. Daeron is almost asleep when he hears noise coming from the top of the pit. He can hear the sound of scuffling feet and voices yelling. One golden eye blinks open to see what it is. He assumes they are finally coming to feed him.

This is unexpected, but good, because he can still eat. He lifts his head and waits hopefully to see what they will throw down. Rather than throwing it in immediately, they hold it over the top as if to tease him. Daeron is disappointed at the sight of it. It is a tiny, little thing. Barely a mouthful. It is struggling, kicking and screaming. It does not want to go down into the pit, but the others force it over the edge. Down it falls, like a little screaming speck of gold in the dark. Daeron catches it before it can hit the floor.