The last of the Dragons-Set 2

218

The Next Day

I had gotten very little sleep. While the screaming, crying and begging of people being ruthlessly tortured had mostly fallen silent as the soldiers went to sleep for the night, with the exception of a few who were left dying where their torture took place, my situation kept me awake all night. I prayed to hear the sound of wings flapping over head, coming for me, but it simply wasn't to be. 

The sun was slowly rising, and I could already hear people in the cells around me beginning to mumble to each other, some of them crying as quietly as they could. Not long after I woke, soldiers slowly started approaching the cells from their barracks. Without a word, they started unlocking cells, seemingly at random. I walked to the front of my cell and did my best to look out, trying to see what was happening. The soldiers were pulling people, screaming and crying from their cells as their cell mates called out for them, sobbing. While they walked past several cells at a time, they would select a random cell, open it, and randomly select one of its occupants to be pulled from it. Some of the torturous deaths didn't happen anywhere that I could see them, with many people being dragged to far for me to see. But, some of the killing happened in a spot where I could see everything that was happening. Several soldiers restraining people as they squirmed, trying to free themselves as they watched others being brutally tortured. The devices used for these brutal executions looked complicated, their function only becoming clear as I observed people being put to death by their use. I focused in on one specific group of people who were being skinned alive, directly across from my cell, maybe fifty feet away from me. I watched in disgust as the soldiers tied a young man down and effortlessly began cutting the skin from his limbs as he screamed in pain. After only a few minutes, they flipped the man on his stomach, causing him to scream again as his exposed flesh was pressed down against the hard metal table. Without skipping a heart beat, the soldiers began removing the skin from his back, until the man had no skin covering his flesh. The soldiers picked the man up, and tossed him into a large, two wheeled cart off to the side of the table, as two others pulled the next person forward. As they began to peel the skin from the screaming woman, the first victim continued to moan in pain as he lay, skinless, in the cart off to the side.

I switched my gaze off to the far left. I could see someone being thrown into a large metal container, perhaps ten feet long and about four feet wide, with a fire lit below it. It quickly became clear to me that the device was meant to slowly cook the victim inside alive, until death. Given the somewhat hidden nature of that device, with the majority of the torture taking place within itself, I again switched my gaze elsewhere. 

Back behind one of the skinning tables, there was a man being hung upside down, being sawed in half, just like the woman from the day before. His screaming quickly fell silent as the saw cut through his abdomen, spilling his organs out over his head and onto the ground around him. I quickly looked away at the sight of so much blood and guts spilling out. I'm not sure why this bothered me as much as it did, given what I had seen so many times before. All the while, people were being dragged back and forth, in and out of my sight.

My ears were ringing with the constant screams, and my head had a constant, and ruthless pounding within it the entire time. I was at the point where I would rather be put into any one of those torturous devices, if it meant ending the constant headaches and fear of the world I was now living in. Just as that thought crossed my mind, two soldiers stepped in front of my cell, and looked down at me.

"She's the bitch with those dragons." One soldier said.

The other chuckled to himself.

"Then what the hell is she doing here?" He said to the other.

"She's a clumsy one. Fell off her's as one of ours chased them down. Got hauled in with the few rebels who survived." The first soldier replied.

The second soldier scoffed.

"Bring her. We're going to teach her a little lesson." He said as he unlocked my cell.