The Boy and the Animal

Part I | Seventeen

When Dark came to, he was suddenly overcome with the sense of nausea. The rocking, jerking sensation like being popped inside of a frying pan was the first to greet him. A moist air and a thick cloud of dust was the second. But the third caught him worse than his stomach churning.

Wide open fields as far as the eye could see, his city at its horizon basking in a glorious golden setting sun whose crown extending in all directions upon the vast sky- all behind the slits of a rickety, urine-stained cell of wood at what he could only guess was the back of a carriage. His heart sank underneath his feet, cord that attached it to life severed.

With a lump slicing into his throat, he burst up- from the strawed floors of the tiny cage he'd been thrown into like a plague victim into a pit- and grasped at the wood door to the cage. The device let not even a quick jerk faze it. Instead, the chains clasped to his wrists jingled. With a frustrated, tearful sigh, Dark smashed his head against the wood in defeat.

...They were trapped.

He couldn't remember much after diving from the window of his inn. Oh gods, he thought with his knuckles burning white, his inn. The poor old gal was likely in ashes by then, and, looking up, he was sure he could see a stream of smoke rising from the city on the horizon. It was like watching its soul ascend. His inn was gone.

His chest tightened. It wasn't the only one that he had lost. At that thought, Dark sunk against the walls of the cage surrounding him and buried his face in the knees he hugged to his chest. A deep, sickening feeling crawled out of his chest and balled in his throat.

How had this happened? Just moments ago, it seemed, everything had been going so perfectly. He felt like he was slowly regaining his family, and his inn was becoming more and more popular- thanks to a sweet boy that won everyone over with that mew and smile. Boy...

Dark glanced over across the cell to find Jesiter sitting in the corner. The boy was chained in heavy binds, supported and double supported by locks and thick metal. His mouth was muzzled, but Dark could see his eyes flutter open and look at me. He didn't seem to have been sleeping; in fact, he seemed to be very aware of what was going on.

Seeing him the way he was, the man almost felt sorry for him, but then that sympathy diluted into anger when the memory of what had happened to his home returned to him. Dark clenched his fists. Everything that had happened... It was all Jesiter's fault! He was the one that man was after! He was the one that had brought all the trouble!

And now they were both going to jail for something he had no part in. Looking at the boy, his heart turned cold, and his eyes burned with an intense flame. He could feel his anger, confusion, and grief pooling at his stomach. Jesiter made to reach out to him for comfort. Dark simply turned away from him, gritting his teeth.

They didn't sit in silence for too long before the bumps and jerks of the carriage suddenly came to a halt, and the sound of muffled boots walking around the carriage sifted through their ears. Dark gulped. He didn't know who was coming or where they were taking them; there were no less than charred bodies in the ruins of his inn, three of the high-ranking, so not much was left to the imagination.

The rustling of a key switching inside of the lock sounded from outside, when the doors were suddenly ripped open, the rays of the sunset flooding into the dark, cramped confines of the cell. Dark shielded his eyes, the silhouette of a person focusing into that of a guard in armor he had never seen before.

"Get out. Slowly, hands on your head," the guard ordered.

He did as she instructed, placing his hands on his head and crawling out from the cage until he reached the edge. With the minimal amount of sudden movements he could manage, he reached his foot down to the ground and stood at the front of the cage.

There, another guard grabbed him by the arm and ripped him ahead of the carriage, toward unassuming ruins of a shrine not uncommon in the country. Beneath the surface, he soon found however, it was much more than the shattered remains of an ancient tribute.

It was a dungeon.

Dark's heart began to pound, but he dared not fight back as he was ushered through a dark hallway lit by torches that only seemed to darken the shadows around them somehow. He was choking on a scream. Goosebumps from his trembling flesh and the icy draft blowing against him rose on his skin.

Behind him, as the sight of a long row of cells grew closer- some empty, others harboring skeletons with loose skin hanging on them, all of which he could not tell were dead or alive- he could hear Jesiter screaming and fighting the guards holding him. The sound only made his blood boil. Jesiter was the monster; they should've just taken him.

At the end of the hallway, the guard kicked open the door and tossed Dark into the cell. Dark fell against the ground on his hands and knees, and, when he opened his eyes, he found himself on top of a half rotted corpse with roaches crawling from its oozing orifices. The man screamed, scrambling back to get away from the decaying body.

Now, sitting in the corner and taking in the sight of the new cell around him, he was paralyzed. The bricks were stained and dripping with splattered blood, the floors sticky with dust and fluids he couldn't even identify. To call it a sty would be like placing a massacre on the third page of a newspaper. More than a holding for prisoners, his surroundings was a graveyard.

He snapped his eyes shut and concentrated on the screaming heart on the verge of panic and hyperventilating. Even the sound of the six guards chaining Jesiter to the wall was muffled by the internal sobs and pounding in his ears. They were trapped, and he was going to die here, the man resolved. Any hope he might've had was simply to die quickly.

As Dark prayed to the gods he had been so faithful to for a payoff of his loyalty, the son of one of them smashed and thrashed and roared inside of his chain, oblivious to his situations. It didn't matter to him how bleak the outlook. All he could focus on was fighting. 17 years had seen his survival this way, and he wasn't going to abandon it then.

The guards left, and, for what seemed like hours, there was silence mixed with screaming and rustling chains like the water dripping from the faucets mixed with the blood smeared across the floor. Finally, Dark grew tired of his incessant antics and managed to open his eyes once again.

"Just shut up already!" He shouted at the boy. With wide eyes, the boy shut his mouth and swallowed. The deep curve of the man's brows wavered, until he sighed and looked down at his singed shoes. "Just be quiet. You've done enough."

Jesiter felt something pierce his chest at this. Why was Big Brother angry at him? What did he do? He wanted to crawl into his arms and hug him, but the cold hard things were locking him up so tightly he could hardly breathe. It all hurt so much, and the one person he wanted to run to...

Was gone.

Suddenly, footsteps passed by them, stopping at the door to their cell. Their eyes immediately found the source. Dark froze; he'd never seen anything like the spine-shattering blue of the eyes that stared back at him, nothing like their dead, haunting hue. Jesiter growled. He knew this person- the woman with the evil eyes.

"12301997 and 12301998, you are charged with terrorism, assassination, being and harboring an threatening anomaly, and larceny. 12301997, you will be experimented on and researched. 12301998, you will be executed one week from today."

The woman spoke quickly, robotically, and then she was gone. Dark could hardly react to what had just been said, the words still ringing in his ears. He shuddered. Execution... In a week? It wasn't anything he hadn't expected, but to really hear it...? He buried his face in his arms.

"Dark okay. Jessy protect." Jesiter assured him, voice muffled by his muzzle.

"No," Dark mumbled. "I don't want your protection."