Kindred: The Man With No Name

Keera

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Keera shifted uncomfortably in the chair. Everything about the office put her off. At the far front, perched marginally above ground level stood a single tall marble stained window- the kind you'd find mostly in old church ruins.

It was sealed shut. The curtains, however, were slightly drawn back, causing little patches of light to streak inside. The only part of the room the light properly illuminated was the opposite end of the warden's desk. It was huge, pitch black and crafted from mahogany, with four ends that were held up by brass snakelike leg supports that dug into the ground. The desk's vastness and the room's partial dark nature meant that it almost entirely masked the person sitting behind it- an effect that only heaped onto Keera's growing paranoia.

The walls and floors alike were polished with stone. Its darkest aspect though surprisingly lay not with the demonic structure at the center. You had to look profoundly acute enough to spot it. Dead in the corner, etched into the wall at a sickeningly high angle and flickering in the darkness.

Chains.

They were meant to suspend just as much as to bind. That's how the dungeon got its name. Any reasonable human being would have had the wall torn down ages ago. But Dragen was neither reasonable nor human.

Though to be fair, most of the Tower's inhabitants weren't either. They wore her kind's skin, felt as they did, experienced love, pain, and death- albeit much slower. But they weren't human.

Their eyes burned bright, constricted to the point that they were dots. They were Everlasting, born into this world, but not of it. The tower was set up to nurture their light, and expunge it if the council, in its infinite wisdom, deemed it necessary.

"Are you even listening?"

Jolted out of her thoughts, Keera found herself in the dungeon again.

"She is just a child."

"A child with the mouth of a sailor. We both know that this isn't the first time she has been reprimanded. There have been incidents.

Incidents which I cannot overlook anymore."

"It can't have been that many_"

Dragen shot out of her chair like it had been set ablaze, "Wilcrow," her voice cut through sharply. The door slowly creaked open, and a plump little woman nervously drifted into the room.

"Read it," Dragen said shortly.

Keera watched apprehensively as the woman dug into her robustly velvet coat, and pulled out a long sheet of parchment that rolled on to the floor.

"All of it?" Wilcrow asked nervously.

"I will tell you when to stop."

Wilcrow cleared her voice before she began, "Ass, ass-hat, ass-face, bitch, butt pirate, butt thumb, camel's anus, cock sucker, cock sucking whore, cow, cunt, cheese dick, dickass, dick breath, dick deprived cunt, dick deprived whore, dick deprived troll, fuck-tard, inbred- cunt, lickspittle, nipple-headed-cheese wart, pillock, semen-depository, shit-stick, shit-dick..."

"Enough," Dragen's voice cut through once again. Wilcrow folded her long winding parchment and blundered out of the room. Keera sat stock-still, as waves of shock crashed over. Dragen sat patiently, waiting for her to break the silence again. An uncomfortable minute stretched before she did.

"I honestly think that she has gotten better since she came here," Keera said earnestly, nervously matching Dragen's gaze. It was true, in part at least. A few choice words were mild compared to half of the things the girl had done.