The Fall of the Keepers

Chapter 44 Rock Bottom

He was coming back again, the silent man who delivered my food. Once I had seen his face in the glow of his flashlight, he had dark skin, dull eyes, and a scraggly beard. I guessed he came once a day, though in the endless darkness I couldn't really know for sure. If I was correct, I had received nine meals so far, meaning I had been there in that dank cell for nine whole days.

"Where am I?"
I croaked my daily question.

The flap under the door opened and the standard tray was shoved in at me, the empty one then taken away by a gloved hand groping for it in the poor light.

"Do you even speak?"
I sighed, wondering if perhaps he were a mute.

"I speak, just not to filth like you."
A gravelly voice replied.

I was so startled that I completely forgot to ask him my other regular question: How long will be I kept here? I hadn't gotten an answer yet though and it wasn't likely I'd have received one that day.

I clutched at the metal cup of water, trying to take it in slow sips to make it last. They were only giving me enough to keep me alive, and my throat grew dry and scratchy in the hours that preceded the arrival of my next meal. I'd fallen into a glum pattern, sadly the meal was the main event of the day.

My ankle was nearly healed by now for all the good it would do me, it wasn't as though I was doing much walking on it. My shoulder still ached but I didn't mind the pain so much, it kept me grounded in reality. If I could feel the dull throb then I knew I wasn't dead yet. I couldn't see myself of course but I knew that I must have looked a fright. It's difficult to keep tidy when you can't see your hands in front of your face. It's even more difficult when you are living in a cell that I figured to be about six feet by eight feet with no water, toilet, or even a bucket.

I tried to keep my bodily waste off to one side but even if that kept me from stepping in it, the stench permeated the whole room never-the-less in a nauseating fashion. I had thrown back up the tasteless paste they had brought me to eat once which added the lovely acidic aroma of stomach bile to the overall scent of the room.

I'd finally gotten brave enough to relocate Mr. Bone's pieces and parts into a pile at the furthest end of the room, to prevent myself from accidentally rolling into him in my sleep. I'd done that once or twice and it made for an abrupt awakening let me tell you. Sometimes I talked to him, for lack of anything better to do but I always questioned the tenuous grip I had on my sanity afterward.

"Someone will come for me."
I'd told the skeleton only yesterday.

"I'm not like you, left down here to die. I have friends, they'll come for me."

Surely Jasper and Vienna would find a way to rescue me, it always seemed like they were coming to my aid. If not them, there was a whole Clan of Wind Wielders who would fight for their lost Princess, not to mention Kairos, Idris, Ghost, and Leah. Somebody would come for me, they were surely working on it right now. I was probably in a hidden location, making their job more difficult was all. That's what I kept reminding myself of, as the time slipped by. I just had to wait it out, this darkness wouldn't last forever.

"Quetta will want to make an example of me, she'll send for me once I've been down here long enough to be frazzled by the experience and then she'll make some big scene."
I informed the dead man on what I was counting as day eleven.

That was Quetta's M.O. She was probably doing the same thing to Ranen, hoping to break the two of us. I was determined not to let her win, I would come out fighting mad whether she left me here two weeks or two months. It would eventually come to an end I told myself over and over, it had to.