The Quest of the Hudion

Chapter 7 - The Qun

The zombie guard threw me to the ground, and my bones shook with the impact of the cell door slamming heavily behind him.  I rose shakily to my callused feet, wincing with every movement of my frozen joints.  I wiped my blistering hands on my once golden dress, failing miserably to rid myself of stench and grime.

Regaining my composure, I stared around at my new surroundings.  I lay in a crumpled heap on the floor of a smaller cell, and the last ray of faint light faded away as the cell door was locked.  I rushed to the door, and grappled with the lock.  It held like a sword in stone.  I sobbed with frustration, and held my hands to my ringing ears, blocking out the agonizing howls of fellow prisoners.  Their inescapable cries of sadness sliced through every wall.  I sank to my knees, not caring that my dress was shredded by the jagged floor.  Slowly, my head drooped, and my body succumbed to the soft power of slumber.

❦

I jolted awake what seemed like days later.  It could have been seconds.  It could have been hours.  It could have been weeks, or even months.  In my prison cell, nothing mattered to anybody, and time crept by with an unidentifiable pace, eluding everyone and everything.

An intoxicating stench filled the room, making me gag and choke on every breath.  One of the guards entered with an empty scowl, carrying a tray laden with stale, crusty bread and sour, contaminated water.  I grimaced as the tray was dropped in front of me.  This was a meal?  As the door slammed and locked behind the guard, I dipped the rock hard crusts in the opaque water.  The bread quickly became inedible mush, dripping slowly through my fingers.  I sighed and shoved the tray into the corner, hiding it from my starving eyes.

Trying to distract my anxious mind from pessimistic thoughts, I played with the granules of stone on the uneven floor.  Amongst the crumbs of rock, I found a grey hair.  Greatly surprised and thoroughly curious, I followed the strand.  It was joined by more silvery hairs, then more, then still more, until a mass of matted hair took form.  I grimaced, disgusted with the bugs and slime which had become intwined with the strands.

Just as I hurriedly turned away from the mass of seemingly lifeless hair, something caught the corner of my eye.  I turned, and saw that there was an odd heap in the corner, with a startlingly human appearance.  The matted hair formed a silvery road, leading to the repulsive disheveled pile.

Overcome by my ungainly curiosity, I crept towards the source of the begrimed silver road.  Crawling on all fours, I cautiously approached the jumble of fabric.  Nothing about it hinted at life, and signed, slumping adjacent to the lifeless bundle.  I gingerly gave it a poke, to reassure myself that it was completely and utterly dead.  Instead of visual silence, my eyes detected a slight twitch towards the top of the heap.  Surely just a trick of the light.

I shakily tugged on a scrap of grimy canvas.  Slowly, ever so slowly,  a tentative head rose out of the mass.  I gasped involuntarily.  It was a human face, carved with lines by the hands of time and sadness.  His eyes communicated desperate hopelessness, and his brow was creased with a look of loss.  

"How did you get here?" I asked, forgetting my previous hesitation.  He cleared his little-used throat, and spoke in a withered voice.

"I was captured a long long time ago," his eyes became misty with tears.

"I came here through a porthole,"  I replied.

"On purpose?!"  He sat bold upright, staring me square in the face.

"In a way, I guess," I shrugged my shoulders.

"Why?" 

"Curiosity."

He nodded his head, making his lengthy beard ripple in strange waves.  "Many captives stumbled into this world for the very same reason," he said, he said, finally taking interest in my topic, "Curiosity killed the cat, eh?"