The Goblin's Crown

Chapter Twenty Two: Prison of Nothing

 I coughed, sucking in gulps of air. I blinked, trying to get my vision cleared for several panicked minutes before I realized that the nothing, I could see...the nothing I could hear was all there was. I was getting feeling back in my torso. I tried to get up, but my heavy limbs failed me. They were still frozen. Whatever was done to me still needed time to wear off. Time, I did not have.

"Knut!" I screamed his name until I was hoarse. My calls were met with dead silence. Not even an echo returned to my ears. I muttered a goblin curse I'd picked up under my breath. He wasn't near me. He must have landed further away.

I lay there a while, possibly hours, just waiting for feeling to return to my legs and arms. I kept dozing and startling myself awake, afraid that if I let myself sleep, I'd miss the fourth bell and even the slim chance I had of winning my bet. I was insane. I had to be to take such a foolish gamble. The only things I knew of The Pit was what Knut had told me and he'd spent ten years in this place and had never found a way out. And I was going to escape in a day? Not likely, but hell if I wasn't going to try. I wasn't going to leave Knut. Even if I never made it out again, at least he wouldn't be alone this time. I just had to find him.

"What's this?" I shivered at the startling sound. It was a whisper, barely more than a breath, yet it was like a scream in this aching silence.

"A woman?" Another voice questioned.

"Smells human." Another chuckled, sounding hungry and eager.

"Not completely. I smell something else on her...sort of smells familiar, but I can't place it." Yet another person sniffed at the air. I could hear air being sucked through nostrils as if they were right there beside me, even though I couldn't see anyone.

"She smells delicious. Can I get the first taste?" One of the others cackled.

Suddenly, forms eased out of the darkness, separating themselves from it as if they were breaking the surface of a muddy pond. I counted seven at least. A mix of faeries of both courts and a single elf, all men, all horrifically emaciated. The faeries' wings had been severed, leaving only painful looking, flailing nubs, that still tried in vain to fly. The elf lacked the branches that normally wove through an elf's hair. What sprigs remained were withered and dead. Those long flowing locks had been cut away. My gaze focused on the faeries' ruined wings. She hadn't just clipped them as you would a pet bird, she'd torn them off.

"Who are you?" I asked, trying to get up again only for my arms to give way beneath my weight.

"We were just wondering the same thing." One of the Unseelie fairies said. His silver eyes raked over me, biting into my flesh. "What's a human woman doing here?" The men gathered around me, circling me like a pack of wolves around a wounded doe, blocking me in.

I knew that look in their eyes. After so long, trapped in this hell hole, they weren't even trying to hide it. It was the same as the man from the brothel. All lust, both for sex and... something else. I needed to get up. I had to get on my feet so I could fight them off. But my legs wouldn't cooperate. They wouldn't even budge.

"Looks like they stuck her with stoneblood." The elf snickered tilting his head in an unnervingly animalistic way. All the innate elf kindness had completely been gnawed away. "Mab might as well have put a pretty bow on her." He pulled a sharpened bone from the waste of the scrap of cloth he used as clothing. "Help me turn her over." He said. Their hands seized me and roughly flipped me onto my belly.

My breath hitched in my throat as I felt the knife cut away the strings of my corset. "Stop!" I shouted, trying to wiggle free from their groping hands. "Lay one finger on me and my husband will gut you all!"