Page 19 of Vasmora

Images that played over and over in merciless repetition.

Was he alive at the bottom of that chasm? In darkness, too?

Shadows seemed to shift around me. Something else trapped inside the cell. A presence I couldn’t see through the lightless space, but it held the same chilling hollow I’d felt each time I’d been visited by the dead. That same cloying scent clogging my throat.

They were there. With me. Watching me.

Waiting.

I counted heartbeats and breaths, assuring myself that I was still alive. That the silence hadn’t consumed me entirely. Hope remained a fragile seed in my heart, buried and patient.

For what, I didn’t know.

Zevander had once told me that he feared the unknown, and perhaps now was the first time I truly understood what he’d meant by that. I couldn’t see beyond the endless dark, nor fathom what Loyce had in mind for me, and that terrified me.

A soft scritching tickled my ankle, and jolting upright, I let out a screech, kicking away from it. The chain attached around my ankle clanked and scraped over concrete, only allowing me to reach the wall before it yanked at the joint. Heart hammering in my throat, I whimpered, unable to see what had touched me, and my mind reeled back to the first time I’d been captured in Aethyria, the grotesque bug I’d encountered in my cell there.

I waited. Ears perked. Nerves prickling.

At no further movement or sensation, I let out a long exhale, the sting of more tears burning in my eyes.

My head felt heavy, my neck aching as I attempted to close my eyes. The room tilted, sending pangs of dizzying nausea curling up my throat. I once again pressed my cheek to the floor, desperate for even a few moments of sleep, my body so weighed by exhaustion and hunger that my muscles burned from the abrupt movement I’d just made.

A ridge in the concrete caught on my fingertip, and I traced the deep groove in the stone that seemed to form a letter.

“I …” I whispered, dragging my finger to the right, where more letters had been etched. “Will.” Sitting up slightly, I continued to follow the words that trailed beneath me. “Not. Obey.”

Sliding my hand lower, I felt more words, and I forced my fingertips back to the beginning, following each letter that burned inside my mind. “I will not beg for mercy.” I repeated the phrase completely. “I will not obey. I will not beg for mercy.”

The defiance in those words spoke to me like a secret between me and whoever had carved them. As if the person who’d written them was there with me right then. It gave me an odd sense of comfort, knowing someone had come before me.

Had they survived?

Perhaps I would, too.

Another tickle pattered across my leg, and when I jerked back my limb, the chain pulled taut. As needle-sharp teeth sank into my skin, I let out a shriek, flailing my limbs, and as I quieted, an obnoxious crunching emerged from the darkness.

No pain that time.

Numb? I pinched my leg. No, no numbness.

Trembling breaths beat out of me as I waited for whatever it was to make itself known.

Two glowing eyes stared back at me, like those of a dog.

My breaths grew rapid and frantic, and I threw out my palm on instinct, but nothing came forth.

“No sense threatening with something you don’t have,” a raspy voice answered. “Besides, I don’t plan to hurt ya. Figured I’d snack on all the bugs you’ve drawn.”

“B-b-bugs?”

Sparks bounced off the concrete with three hard scrapes and caught on a bundle of kindling. The light, the first I’d seen, was so unbearably bright, I raised my arm to shield the burn in my eyes. After allowing my sight to adjust, my mind to recalibrate, I lowered my arm to find broken, black shells lying about the floor. Hundreds of them.

One of them shifted near my leg, and a bug like one I’d encountered back at Bonesguard scampered toward the torn hem of my dress. Before I could so much as kick at it, the flame wavered, and tiny paws swiped it up. A rat-like creature shoved it into its mouth, the bug filling his small cheeks as he chomped away.

“A Golvyn.”

He paused, mid-crunch. “You’ve seen my kind before?” he garbled around a mouth full of food.