The Fall of the Keepers

Chapter 43 Trapped

When I awoke, I wasn't entirely sure that I had. It was as black about me with my eyes open as with them closed, no matter how rapidly I tried to blink. My head was pounding and my mouth felt like it had been swabbed out with cotton. Half in a daze I tried to stand, crying out in pain as I put weight on my twisted ankle. I rubbed my shoulder, wincing at the throbbing in it that wouldn't seem to go away.

Where am I? What's happening?

"Hello?"
I said out loud.

There came no reply. My memories came rushing back to me, the battle in the sky, Ranen unconscious in the snow, the dart to the neck. I moved my hand to my neck, feeling a tenderness there where I had been struck.

"Ranen?"
I couldn't help the quaver in my voice.

I tried to stifle the panic that was rising up inside me but I felt as though I couldn't breathe with this oppressive darkness squeezing me on all sides. I needed movement, activity of some kind.

I turned over on my hands and knees, inching in a direction at random, feeling a rough stone floor beneath me. There was a rattling that startled me and a heaviness on my good ankle that I hadn't noticed at first. Moving my hands down my leg, my fingers came to rest on a cool chunk of metal that was clamped tightly around my booted foot. I grasped hold of the cuff, rotating it until I found the chain that stemmed out of it. Hand over hand I hauled the links in, making a pile of it beside me. When the line went taut, I crawled forward, finding it connected to what felt like a massive grimy bolt in the floor. My anxiety was rising but I tried not to focus on the chain holding me down. There was much to be learned about my location yet.

Hesitantly, I moved forward splashing through something wet that I sincerely hoped was only water before bumping into what felt like a solid stone wall. I used the wall to help me stand, and felt all along it as high and as far out as I could stretch. Each stone felt different but it was the same wall in all directions I could move my limbs. I half shuffled, half hopped to my left until I came to a corner. I felt along carefully here, hoping for a door, a window, or an air duct even. There was nothing.

So I continued my slow progression down the new wall, all the while struggling to keep myself calm. A few moments later I found myself at another corner. It wasn't very large this dark stone room I seemed to be locked in. Was it a cell, a pit, a cave? It was definitely a prison of some sort, judging by the shackle on my ankle.

The air was stale I noted, as though nothing had breathed here for a very long time. Perhaps I was underground, yes there were many places buried beneath the earth in Itova. I had to be in Itova I thought to myself, where else would the rebels take me to? This certainly wasn't the cells beneath the Winter Palace, I, of course, had been down there before and they had a far more modern feel to them. This place, with its chains and stone, felt old, very old.

I felt along the third wall, the texture finally changing from stone to wood. I made a little noise in my throat, surely this was the exit. I felt about for a handle or bars, wincing when I did nothing more than collect splinters on my hands. At the very bottom of the door I found a very small flap that could be push out with a creaking sound, but the world beyond was just as dark. I worked my way back up, finally locating three iron bars covering a narrow opening at the very top of the door, right at my eye level.

I inhaled and exhaled deeply, my relief dialing up to panic without my consent. I didn't like feeling trapped, especially when I was completely and utterly alone. Trying to keep my sanity I continued my stilted way along the remainder of the wall, coming to a third corner. I was just making my way down the final wall of the small room when my feet collided with something, catching me by surprise and sending me tumbling in a heap to the floor with a loud clatter.