The Fall of the Keepers

Chapter 46 A Change

When the meal came that day, I swallowed the tasteless paste without complaint and sipped on the meager glass of water gratefully. In my starvation attempt, I had lost track of the time I had been down there, but it didn't much matter anyway. Whatever happened I had this new beam of hope blossoming inside me. It wasn't that I thought everything was going to work out to some sort of magical happy ending, but I knew that whatever might come about, I was going to be okay, I didn't have to struggle through it alone anymore.

Vienna had once shared a piece of poetry with me by the author she had taken her Keeper name from. I couldn't remember the whole thing but the first stanza stuck out clearly in my mind.

"Hope is the thing with feathers,
That perches in the soul.
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all."
I murmured aloud.

I hadn't really understood those words when I'd first heard them. Now, I was beginning to.

Another dozen or so meals came and I focused primarily on gaining back bits and pieces of my lost strength. It was hard to do when I was given so little in the way of sustenance but I did my best. I started small, pacing from wall to wall for exercise. Sometimes I'd run circles if I was feeling particularly good, other days I'd simply stretch myself out as best as I could manage without any light. I certainly wasn't fighting fit, but at least I wasn't a motionless twig on the floor. The activity was good for my mind too, gave me something to concentrate on in the long hours that always seemed to drag by.

I no longer talked to the skeleton, he was after all just a pile of bones. I did, however, talk to the living God who was now with me. I didn't hear his physical voice again, but deep down I knew that he heard every word I was saying. I spoke about my family and friends, asking for their safety and health. If I couldn't be up there doing something for them the very least I could do was pray for them. And maybe that was more powerful than anything I had ever tried to achieve in the past. It was hard to say really, I didn't entirely know how the prayer thing worked. It kept me from going crazy at least, having someone real to talk to in that unending darkness.

I was six hundred and seventy-three steps into my pacing routine when my trial in the dark finally came to an end. There was a rattling of keys outside the door, rather than the squeak of the flap at the bottom opening. I halted, perfectly motionless as I watched the flicker of light outside the bars. There was a scraping of metal on metal, a click, and then the heavy door swung outwards revealing my scruffy-looking jailer with his flashlight in hand. I covered my eyes, the meager light seeming blinding to me after so long in the darkness.

"Come on you, it seems you aren't to die down here after all."
He rasped, not sounding very happy about it.

My hand dropped to my side and my heart raced as he stepped aside, giving me leave to exit. My feet felt glued to the ground and I stared at the opening in a sort of shock. I truly hadn't known if this day would come or not and I couldn't put words to the roller coaster of emotions that I was going through.

"Unless you'd like to stay?"
The jailer questioned, clearly not understanding my hesitancy.

"No! I, no."

I lifted my chin, exhaled, and stepped over the threshold with exhilaration. The jailer knelt down and unlocked the cuff about my ankle, tossing the chain back into the cursed cell without a second thought. To me, it felt symbolic, though others might have laughed at me for thinking so. But I wasn't the person who had been thrown into that cell anymore. She was weighed down with darkness, shackled to her past and her mistakes. The person that was walking out of that cell was free, she was leaving her shackles behind to rot in the darkness. I didn't know what was about to happen to me, but as I was marched down a narrow hallway, past dozens of cells identical to the one I had been kept in, I knew I would never look back. They could torture me now, kill me, or enslave me, but they couldn't take away the freedom I had found. I had finally come to understand something about freedom, there was more than one kind. There was a physical kind that one had to work for, it was quite costly in fact and it could be taken away at a moment's notice. And then there was the internal kind, that was a gift. You couldn't earn it, but you could receive it, and once it belonged to you no one on earth could steal it away.