Displaced

Chapter 17

Three hundred and twenty eight. That was how many stones made up the walls of Leo Feldmanis's home. He would know; he'd counted them hundreds of times. There wasn't much else to do when you spent your every day in an Otharian prison. Each day blurred into the next, the passage of time told only though the movement of shadows and the arrival of the occasional meal. The ex-Voice had no idea how many years had transpired since the start of his incarceration. He'd tried to keep track in the beginning, marking the days as they came and went, but soon things became fuzzy, and eventually he stopped trying altogether. There was little worth in counting towards the day of your release, after all, when you had been sentenced to a lifetime in a cell.

He'd thought that he'd figured it all out. He'd thought that they would never notice something so small, so well-hidden. They'd noticed. Now he spent his days counting stones, waiting to grow old. Waiting to die.

The worst thing about life in Eveningtide Prison was the monotony, or so he'd thought. The dreary day-to-day life withered your spirit, draining you of your will to exist. He'd seen many a prisoner shrivel up from it until what was a person was now nothing but an empty husk. He could feel it happening to himself as well, regardless of what little fight still burned within. One day he would fall like all the others.

But he'd discovered that there was indeed something worse than the slow, inevitable erosion of the soul. That process at least had the side effect of numbing its victim, letting them slip painlessly into the night. This was the opposite. It poked at him actively, taunting him with his own futility, parading his fears and doubts before him, hinting at possibilities and leaving them to fester. For the first time since his confinement, something had happened on the outside. Something big. Something important. But he would never know what it was.

His thoughts went, as always, to his village, his wife. He'd had confidence that they would survive even without him, as long as they obeyed the Church and his replacement. He'd impressed that knowledge into them when the Apostle had come for him. They'd trusted his judgment. Otharia was not a haven for change. Decades could pass between notable events.

But now he wasn't sure that remained true. Disquieting hints of something amiss kept appearing. Several of the prison guards were nowhere to be found, gone without warning. The others, who before would amble down the halls without a care in the world, nonchalantly going about their daily business, now walked with a tension unlike anything he'd ever seen. These people, grown men and women, were scared of something. Something all-encompassing enough to scare each and every one of them.

At the same time, Leo had begun to hear sounds off in the distance that he'd never noticed before. Strange, rhythmic clicks and clacks would pass by at predictable patterns each day, always too far to properly make out. He thought they sounded like footsteps, but there were too many feet. Maybe new patrols of two-man groups? He wasn't sure. What he was sure of was that these new sounds had appeared very soon after the sudden change in the guards' demeanor, and while he couldn't prove a link, everything inside him screamed that the two occurrences were related.

Divorce was not an option in Otharia. As long as he still took breath, his wife was not allowed to marry another, meaning she had no husband to help support her. Was she safe? Was she even alive? He would never know. All he could do was stew in his own worry, day after day. It was enough to make him tear his hair out, had balding not done the job for him already.

The sound of a door opening down the hallway interrupted his circuitous thoughts. Strange, it was far too early for a meal. Soon he heard the sound a chains. Now this had his full attention. The sound of chains only came with prisoner movement. He listened harder, trying to make out the number of footsteps. One set would be for a guard. If there was a second, that was a new prisoner. If not, somebody was about to leave their cell. He could only hear one.