Devour | on hold

Chapter 17 (Wrecked)

- Chapter Seventeen -

**LENNO'S POV**

Wrecked

A month has passed. I’m still imprisoned in the same hut. These cells are different from the other huts we live in, they’re extremely well locked. I’ve tried dozens of times to break my way out, but couldn’t. Also the fact that guards are everywhere surrounding the cells, makes it even harder to plan an escape.

I wonder what takes them too long to decide my punishment, and then I come to a conclusion that maybe prison itself is the punishment. And it feels worse than death.

The sun has just risen, which means the guards are on their way. I have nothing to do but wait for my hours of torture. I don’t know if my body still has any unmarked places where they can still beat. But it’s a lot better than the other alternative, which is eating me alive. They haven’t – I think – eaten fresh meat in a long time, other than animals’, since the peace treaty between the two tribes. Except for those of us who’s been lost and never found. Kidnapped. In all ways, I know I’m a desired, anticipated meal. I wonder why I’m still a living whole.

Before, I’ve never thought anything is impossible, until I think, now, of fighting five armed men on my own. Everyday, precisely after the sun rises bright in the sky, five guards come through the door, armed with knives, arrows, and other weapons my tribe doesn’t know about. So, accordingly, neither do I. They bind me to a log dug into the ground. They restrain me and take off my shirt. And a series of slaps and beats that I don’t recognize hit me.

I’ve been using my fingernails to carve small crosses on the wooden log, each cross is a day that passed by. A day that left my world without me giving it anything to remember. I’m running out of time, slowly or quickly running out of life. I may not make it out of here. This thought has never left me, and it scares the hell out of me, I have to push it away every time. I must make it out of here; for the sake of the people I love.

Every cross leaves my finger bleeding, a small metaphor of my whole bleeding body, a negligible pain compared to what I truly feel, the real amount of pain throbbing in every part of my body.

I hear footsteps outside, but I’m too weak and pained that I can’t sit up, all I know is that I’m sleeping in the same position since days, maybe weeks. I literally memorized the patterns of the straws thatching the hut; I’ve been staring at them for too long, having nothing else to do, or no strength to look elsewhere. I’m weaker than I’ve ever been in my entire life, throughout all my twenty-one years. Pain is unbearable, made harder with grief. This month seems to make me forget about all those years I’ve lived outside these four walls, that seem to expand now, making the hut spacious. As if this is what my entire world will be from now on. It expands to make me believe this is all I’ll have. A hut that can only take me and the five guards, that has that log as the only piece of furniture, and I’m supposed to live with that. It’s getting bigger now that I’m used to it, that its walls are the new and only limit of my eyesight.

This hut is sucking me in it, sucking my will to escape it, taking all my revolutionary thoughts away, stripping me off hope. It is imprisoning my brain now inside the walls of hopelessness, after already imprisoning my body inside its rough walls. All my strength is whipped off me with every whooshing rope swing swiping my chest or back. I’m left to clean my own blood and drown in my own sorrow.

I am too tired to look at them when they break into the hut. They seem like it’s the first time they come in and do their favorite mission. They open the door like it’s a new victory. They are full of strength and life, and I envy them because of my lack of both. They step each step on the ground with such intensity and force that they make me believe the ground is shaking underneath me.