The cell beyond is exactly as Arwen described—a stone box barely eight feet by six, no furniture except a thin mat on the floor, no decoration except scratch marks climbing the walls in desperate tallies. The woman inside sits in the corner, knees drawn to her chest, eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond the physical world.
“You’re free.” I keep my voice low. Controlled. The way I’d speak to a frightened animal. “The Abbot is dead. The Keepers are gone. No one is going to hurt you anymore.”
She doesn’t react. Doesn’t blink. Just sits there, breathing in shallow gasps that make the spore-dust swirl around her face.
Arwen appears at my shoulder. “Millicent. Can you hear me? It’s Arwen. I escaped, remember? I came back.”
Something flickers in the woman’s expression. Recognition, maybe. Or fear—fear that this is another test, another trick, another cruelty disguised as hope.
“It’s not a trap.” Arwen crouches at the cell’s entrance, making herself smaller, less threatening. “The monastery is ours now. You can leave. You can go home.”
“Home.” The word comes out cracked, broken, a sound that barely qualifies as language. “I don’t... there isn’t...”
“Then somewhere else. Anywhere but here.” Arwen extends her hand. Palm up. An offer, not a demand. “Take your time. We’ll be here when you’re ready.”
We move to the next cell. And the next. And the next.
Some of them can’t accept it.
A man in the seventh cell—middle-aged, gray threading his hair, his arms covered in the faded scars of self-inflicted wounds—refuses to leave. He presses himself against the far wall when I open his door, eyes wild with terror that has nothing to do with me.
“Close it.” His voice cracks on the words. “Please. Close it. I can’t—I don’t know how to—please.”
“You’re free.” The words feel hollow. Useless. “You don’t have to stay.”
“I don’t know how to be free.” Tears stream down his face, cutting tracks through the spore-dust coating his skin. “The Abbot told me what to feel. What to want. When to eat, when to sleep, when to—” He chokes. Sobs. “Who will tell me now? Who will decide?”
I look at Arwen. She meets my gaze with an expression I can’t read—sorrow, maybe, or the resignation of someone who has seen this before.
“We’ll leave the door open.” Her voice is gentle. “You don’t have to leave today. But the door stays open. When you’re ready—if you’re ever ready—you can walk out.”
We move on.
The next cell holds a woman who screams when light touches her face. The one after that, a teenage boy who tries to attack me with his feeding bowl—the only thing in his cell besides the mat. I catch his wrist before the blow lands, hold him still until the fight drains out of him, then release him without a word.
Cell after cell. Door after door. Each one a separate horror, a unique manifestation of what happens when people are stripped of choice for too long. I check every face as the doors swing open—an old habit, one I thought I’d killed. People I once knew, looking back at me from cells I can’t open fast enough.
These break pieces of me I didn’t know I still had.
Others are different.
A young woman emerges from cell twenty-three blinking against the corridor’s dim light—dim, but still brighter than the darkness she’s lived in for however long she’s been imprisoned. Her face is wet with tears she doesn’t try to hide. Her hands shake as she reaches for the doorframe, as if confirming that it’s real, that the iron isn’t going to slam shut the moment she crosses the threshold.
“Thank you.” The words come out as a whisper. “Thank you, thank you, thank you?—”
She can’t stop saying it. Just repeats the phrase over and over as she stumbles into the corridor, as she passes other cells where other prisoners are making their own choices about freedom.
An older man—Oben, according to Arwen’s murmured identification—walks out of his cell without a word. His expression is blank, unreadable, the look of someone who has forgotten how to feel anything at all. He moves past me without acknowledging my presence, past Arwen, past the other freed prisoners.
“Oben.” Arwen reaches for him. “Wait?—”
He doesn’t wait. Doesn’t respond. Just keeps walking, his pace steady and purposeful, moving toward the wing’s exit with the single-minded determination of someone who has been dreaming of this moment for two decades.
“Should I stop him?” I reach for Arwen’s hand. Find it. Intertwine my fingers with hers.
“No.” She watches him disappear through the archway leading to the main courtyard. “Let him go. He needs to see the trees.”
I don’t ask what she means. I think I understand.
