The Silver Lamp

Chapter II: Winds of Chains

The air was cold and damp. One could feel the moisture in the air simply by being present in the room. Melora was slowly waking, but she made no hurry to open her eyes. She was still in pain, and she was going to rest if she could help it. That was when she felt the cold iron chains on her wrists, keeping her arms held up to the stone bricks of the mossy wall behind her. The cool moss felt soft against the back of her hands. When she came to the sudden realization that she was indeed not lying in her bed, and the memories of what had occurred in the town square came back to her, her eyes shot open.

She was held prisoner in a dark room, with the only light coming from the dimly lit torches along the walls, each one with five feet of distance from the next. The room was shaped like a long box, with each long wall spanning the length of sixty feet. This was the wall that Melora was chained to. She looked around, and there were more people chained to the wall besides her: there were five to her left, and three to her right. There were three empty sets of chains on the end of the wall furthest to her right as well. The wall opposite her had only empty chains stuck into the stone bricks, and the same type of moss growing where the wall met the floor. The shorter walls were only twenty feet long, making the room feel a bit more compact. There was a single large wooden door on each of the shorter walls of the room with metal brackets along the top and bottom, held in place by large iron bolts. The floor of the room was made from the same gray stones that made up the walls, but upon the floor were scattered puddles from the natural collection of dripping water that came through the loosely built ceiling. Several of the torches on the walls had already gone out, making it even harder to see in the room at first. Melora's eyes were quickly adjusting, however, and she could notice more details of the people chained up with her.

Two of the people to her left, she noticed, were either asleep, unconscious, or dead. Judging by the prominent snoring she heard from the furthest, she felt she could accurately guess that sleep was what had overtaken them. The person nearest to her left was an older boy who looked like he could have been no more than sixteen years old. He was unmoving, and his wrists showed signs of struggle from trying to wriggle free from the chains to no avail. He had ruffled black hair and a shirt with a long tear across the chest. His face was scrunched, and he seemed to be deep in thought. The other two people to the left of Melora were either silently sobbing or shaking their heads in disbelief. The two people furthest from Melora's right were silent and unmoving, much like the boy to her other side. The man closest to her right, however, looked extraordinarily paranoid.

He kept looking around the room frantically. He was a heavier man who may have been difficult to chain up were he unconscious like Melora when he was brought here. He had a large bushy mustache that was the same light brown color as the thin hair on the top of his head. He had small brown eyes that looked like little dots on his face, and his wide nose was very noticeable even in the dim light of the room. She could see that he was, or had been, sweating quite a lot even though the room itself was fairly cold. Melora turned to him (as much as she could turn, anyway) and spoke to him.

"Excuse me, sir," she started out, catching the man's attention, "where are we? How did we get here?"

The man gave a deep, sad sigh. "You don't know nothin', do ya?" he asked, shaking his head. He paused to see if Melora would add anything else to her side of the conversation. When she did not speak, he continued. "They ah some sorta cult!" he shouted out to her, sounding quite impatient with her lack of understanding. "They took over the city, right under ah noses, and we did'n even know it..."

"Who are they?" Melora asked him. "Why did they attack us? Where did they come from?"

The man interrupted Melora's many questions. "Nobody knows!" he said. "All I know is that they ah killin' us, one by one... And we ah gonna be next."