Bwandungi Uses Prompts

Shwenki's Dungeon

The man lowered himself onto the pallet overflowing with rough looking hay. His skin hung in sagging bags from his limbs, emptied of any muscle or fat. If it was not for the brightness of his eyes gazing out from sunken sockets, I might have thought him a grotesque wax sculpture.

Shwenkuru was not a sculptor.

The man blinked, his eyelids slow against his eyes, sticking together and pulling apart with effort. Even watching him felt painful and the urge to release him burned in my chest. The images Shwenkuru conjured with exquisite and precise words crept up my arms leaving goosebumps in their wake.

"See, I found the book at the beginning of the hall. The one explaining what you all are and what you're all doing here. I can't let you out."

A wracking cough shook his whole body that trailed into wheezing laughter.

"Your grandfather was a fraud. A man pretending to be king and master, feeding off the strength of others who were deceived by his gift with persuasion."

At the far end of hallway of locked cage entrances a long arm reached out, stretching as far as it could while  its owner grunted with the effort. The voice that originated from the arm's source screeched in frustration, "A farce, a fraud, unworthy, cunning..." and devolved into expletives.

I rounded back on the collection of skin and bones. "What do you mean, a fraud? How does rounding up the most dangerous creatures known to mankind make him a fraud?"

"He didn't tell you, did he?" He whispered, drawing me into an intimacy that felt cloying and sticky.

"Tell me what?"

Wheezing coughs took over and his mirth brought him to a sitting position. "He was one of us."

"One of who?"

He cocked his head and watched me. I'm sure every emotion I felt in those brief seconds played out like a predictable movie plot.

Shwenkuru couldn't have been one of these fit-to-be-committed abominations. He sang to me when Naiba left me pregnant and nursed my heartbreak to wholeness. He'd nursed Mukaaka and raised a gang of fiercely loyal children who'd smiled when the will was read. He read silly children's stories at the local library and fed starving wildlife in the dry season.

"So? What has that got to do with letting you out from behind these bars?" My heart bucked in my chest. That fierce loyalty he'd bred in his children had trickled down.

"How can you trust a man who's never really showed you his true nature?"

"He was my grandfather."

"She's not going to let us out, give it up," a woman's voice called from beyond a curtain of dreadlocks. 

They parted and a sweet smell wafted out conjuring images of home made bread and my long dead mother's perfume. Before  I knew it I'd taken enough steps towards her cage for one of the dreadlocks to reach out and brush up against my arm.

The tickle startled me out of my mother's embrace and back to reality. I stumbled backwards into bars of the cage of the man I'd been talking to.

A muscular arm reached out from behind the bars to wrap its fingers around my wrist and I turned to see the bright eyes close to the bars, no longer sunken inside their sockets.

I tugged at my wrist, watching the strain in his face as he grabbed tighter, but couldn't hold on and I slipped out of his grasp.

"Good," his now sonorous voice said, luscious lips peeling back to show brilliant white teeth. "Now we know what you can do."

I backed away, walking backwards through the hall between the cages till I hit the still open basement door that had led me there.