Kirin: The Dark: Kemassen
Days had lost all meaning, punctuated only by the doling out of food too hot to eat and water too rare to waste, no matter the colour or the taste. The bars of his cage glowed faintly of rust whenever the light from his narrow, barred window hit them, or when the turnkey entered with his smouldering lantern. The rest of the time Kirin lived in darkness.
At night, it was cold.
When Kirin had first woken, he'd been pleasantly surprised to be alive. Now, the novelty had passed. All he'd done was exchange the peace of death for a slow, near-lightless torture.
But how had he died? He had endless time to try and remember, but whenever he did his head and back and legs—his whole body—ached. With little else to do, he tried all the same.
He remembered very little of what had happened during the attack. There'd been a boat, and a tunnel—tight and dark and narrow, and so hot it was like he could smell the warmth wafting off the walls. It had been loud. Vasthes had run on ahead of him, and there'd been a woman—beautiful and haunting. In Kirin's dreams she sometimes told him her name anew, but upon waking his head throbbed so hard he could barely remember his own, let alone that of some foreign siren.
The first time Kirin had opened his eyes a Masseni slave had been dabbing his skin with a damp cloth while another tended bandages Kirin could see but not feel. Panic had gripped him briefly—it was never good when you saw something without feeling it—but then drowsiness swallowed his anxieties. A man with a name oddly similar to Kirin's had buzzed about directing a gaggle of physicians to this or that task.
Kirin had marvelled at the vast, high-ceilinged building in which he was laid out, surrounded by the dead and dying. Masseni bodies lay to either side of him—row after row of groaning men and women in various states of undress and disrepair.
A butcher had marched by holding a bloody leg, amputated above the knee, half crushed from the ankle down. In a rare moment of weakness, the sight had tugged Kirin back into unconsciousness.
The Masseni must have taken Kirin for one of their own, for the vaulted, mosaic ceiling he'd rested beneath couldn't have belonged anywhere but in a palace. Evidently, they'd become wise to his identity, because the next time he'd woken he was down here in this cell.
The window in the corner told Kirin his cell was down. The sun would spear through on rare occasions, illuminating the same patch of sandstone floor. If he strained hard enough, he could sometimes see boots outside as soldiers marched to and fro, stomping their feet and shouting cheerful insults back and forth. In his boredom, Kirin had taken to naming the men by their boots. There was Dusty―most of them could have been Dusty or Sandy, but this one scuffed as he walked, just a little, sending up small clouds of fine sand. Then there was Itchy, whose hand constantly reached down to scratch at the skin beneath his fine footwear. Holes could have used his boots replacing, and then there was the one called Screamer. Due to Screamer's unintelligible yelling, Kirin figured he must be the captain, or at least thought he ought to be. He seemed to hate anyone who came near him.
When it grew dark outside and there were no longer any soldiers to keep Kirin company, he entertained himself by making up stories about them. With each night their made-up lives became more elaborate, until the worlds of the soldiers seemed more real than his own. After all, what life could await him beyond the dark, rough walls of his prison? An executioner, a knife in the night, disease? There'd been two other men locked in the cells along the small corridor, but one had died delusional and trembling from some unknown ailment, and the other had disappeared one day while Kirin had been sleeping. Given time, Kirin would go the same way they had. He had no home and wife to return to like Itchy, no bright future ahead of him like Holes the new recruit. Kirin would never be a war hero like Screamer, and he wouldn't slip easily and lazily into drunkenness like Dusty did every evening after his stint guarding the captives. The soldiers were companions who didn't even know Kirin's name and would never mourn him when he finally was taken away.
