The Prison Realm

Prologue

Rosa: 

 The last thing I remembered was getting ready to make myself a late-night snack. My hangover cure was really more preventative—a peanut butter and jelly sandwich before bed after a long night out. I had just used my hip to shut the silverware drawer closed when something instinctual had me looking up and checking my surroundings.

I wasn't sure what it was that tipped me off. Maybe there was the slightest change in air pressure or temperature. All I know was that one second I was standing there, and the next I was whirling through a dark, airless space. 

The sudden weightless falling sensation only lasted a moment. I landed on a hard stone and my breath sucked in.

About five different bodies in robes made a rough cloth stood around around me, their faces shadowed in their hoods. They were hunched over and leering down at me. I opened my mouth to scream, but someone else beat me to it. I looked at the woman's scream just in time to see someone else in the same predicament that I was in.

Her robed figures pounced on her while she flailed and said something in a different language.

The robed figures around me took advantage of the distraction and did the same. That was when my scream finally let loose. Panic took over. I squirmed as much as was possible, only barely registering the sound of chanting under the glow of a nearby bonfire. I pulled to my feet and dragged across a dusty rock floor.

I caught glimpses of the scenery between bodies.

It was night, but there were too many stars. The lit landscape showed rolling dunes in the distance. A third woman was nearby, but only one robed figure was with her. She was perfectly still, her eyes staring sightlessly at the sky while her only attendant wiped a bloody dagger clean against her skin. I craned my neck to see more, but I was being forced into a nearby tent where more robed figures were waiting. One approached me with a clay bowl in hand. He leaned forward and blew a sharp breath into the bowl. Dust puffed in my direction, and I inhaled it immediately, coughing on it.

My panic left me in a rush.

My adrenaline was gone. My muscles went soft with involuntary compliance. I waited for unconsciousness, but it never came. I was laid down on the floor where more people came to attend to me. They pulled my right arm out and angled it so my palm faced up. I watched helplessly as one dipped a sharpened quill into a toxic-smelling bowl of ink and then started to scrape a pattern into my skin.

The chanting continued until the mandala-looking shape was complete. Had I just been tattooed? The moment the last line was etched something snapped into place in my mind, and it felt like someone had taken that sharp quill and stabbed it right into the left half of my brain. My lips parted to scream, but nothing came out. I couldn't move. Why was I still having to suffer through all of this?

My vision tunneled for the barest moment. A tear of leaked out of my eye.

Somewhere beyond the pain was my first comprehensible thought.

What is happening?

My head wasn't quite swimming when someone chucked my limp body over their shoulder and carried me away. The world swayed with every step the captors took and every vibration rattled my raging headache. Then I heard it. Someone was speaking in an American accented English. My version of English.

"It doesn't matter. Just find a cell and put her in it," was the answer to someone's unheard question. I blinked blearily. These people had not been speaking English moments before, had they? I distinctly remembered a different language being spoken.

Since I was ass-up over someone's shoulder and being carried like a sack of potatoes my view was upside down, but I could only just make out that I was being taken to a huge tent, one that was so large it could have housed entire circus inside. Once we made it past the leather flap doors I saw something possibly even more horrific than anything else I'd seen in the past hour.

There were cages everywhere, stacked on top of one another and beside one another to form makeshift aisles to navigate the expansive space. The faces of curious human women peered from between the bars.

Was this some horrific zoo?

"There's room in the back," said another male voice. My escort grunted something in response and weaved between cages until he seemed to find a suitable one. He stopped and dropped me unceremoniously within, locking the rusted door behind me.

I didn't even have the strength to lift my head, but I was still angled in such a way that I could see I wasn't alone in the cage. Three other women were all tucked away in their respective corners.I looked at each one, my heart still pounding. I waited a full minute for someone anyone to say something. None of them said a word. One of them tucked her head under her arm and laid down as if deciding that the show was over, and she was going to get back to sleep.

Another finally decided to speak.

"Do us all a favor and do not start sniveling the moment you get your voice back," she said. My brow furrowed, the first movement I was capable of. I waited for more. She must know I needed an explanation. She had a similar tattoo scratched into her arm. She must have had the same experience that just had. Why wasn't she helping me?

More minutes came and went. A hush fell over the cages, leaving me alone and confused to deal with the aftermath of the most traumatic thing I'd ever experienced, and I was expected to just sleep it off.

Anger seeped in.

Not just for the robed weirdos that had somehow plucked me from the kitchen of my childhood home and into this hell hole of a world, but also for those women. The same thing had clearly happened to them, and they were just going to leave me paralyzed on the floor, traumatized and with a slew of unanswered questions.

Then and there, I decided one thing. If I woke up to find that this wasn't a nightmare, if there were going to be more going through what I just did, I would do everything in my power to make sure that they never felt the way I did at that moment.