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The guard had very little patience, most of which had already been expended. Since I was not in the mood to instigate more torture, I quickened my pace.
“Hands on your head. Don’t try anything,” he hollered. He unlocked the door, stomping into my cell, stirring the suspended dirt and dust into a dance.
When I complied, he approached, removing a pair of magic-restricting cuffs from his belt. His meaty hands roughly secured my wrists and jerked the chain forward.
The repulsion the manacles sent off against my already raw wrists was excruciating. It made me stumble. Every. Single. Time. Something the guards seemed to relish. Shit, that stings.
I locked my knees, expecting this reaction, and managed to stay on my feet, yet I lost my balance when the guard jerked the chain. I tipped toward him, but before my body collided with his, the guard caught me by the shoulders, his fingers biting into my skin.
I was grateful for that. The last thing I wanted was to be pressed against this fucker’s body.
He dragged me by the upper arm towards the far cellblock door before fully righting me and forcing me to stumble behind him a few steps.
Don’t call him a fucker. Don’t call him a fucker. “Oww! You fucker!”Fuck! I hadn’t meant to say it, I swear. But I only had so much tolerance for assholes.
The guard halted his steps and his free hand collided with my face with a closed fist, snapping my head backward.
I longed to reach up and cradle my burning cheek, but with my hands bound and held in his grasp, I couldn’t do anything but stare daggers at thefucker.
“Do not speak!” he roared into my face, angry spittle flying into my still-gaping mouth.
Guard Fucker.
I resisted the very real urge to throw up on him. Between the odor of the cells and this asshole's spit in my mouth, it was difficult to hold it in.
Instead, I looked him in the eyes and pointedly spit on the ground. I could handle only so much; someone else’s spit in my mouth was a hard limit. I was only human, after all. I bit my tongue against any number of sarcastic remarks that could have left my mouth.
In his utterly unmerited annoyance, the guard was breathing so heavily that I was a little worried for his health. No, I wasn’t. I lied. I had absolutely no wish for him to be healthy. He could keel over right then, and it would be a struggle to restrain myself from dancing on his corpse. Okay, I lied again. I wouldn’t even try to restrain myself. That would be the most energetic dance I’d ever performed.
Despite clearly contemplating hitting me again, Guard Fucker only snarled, turned, and shoved me toward the door.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“You have been summoned.” On that menacing note, he pulled the heavy door open, and we left the high screech of hinges to echo over the empty cell block.
Moving his iron grip to the top of my arm, Guard Fucker dragged me down the hall with the patience and finesse of a bull, mid-castration. Despite the king's warning, he would probably add fingerprint bruises to my collection in the shape of a hoof.
Guard Fucker forced me down the crumbling stairs in front of him. We descended deeper into darkness, shadows dancing in rhythm to the torchlight. The absence of light was one tool used to frighten their prisoners. There were no windows down below. No exit. There was no natural light and very few lanterns.
Each step was more perilous than the last. The cracked stone bit into the bare soles of my feet and made for unsteady steps. Several times the only thing that stopped me from stumbling on an uneven or loose stair was Guard Fucker’s meaty hand clenched tight around the fabric at the back of my neck.
The further underground we walked— the further away from my cell— the more panicky I always became. The journey's end was always the worst part of my day. At least in the cell, I was physically safe. Starvation and the possibility of going insane were my only valid concerns when locked away.
I was eventually deposited in a different room than I had ever been shoved in before. It was still underground but well-lit and lacking the standard torture tools and pools of blood in various congealed stages and other by-products of torture that added to the ambiance of the other rooms I had been kept in.
There were two chairs across from each other at a table, a first. These rooms usually had one solid, heavy chair bolted to the floor. And I was secured to that.
I was shoved onto a cold metal chair facing the door. My hands were secured to a bolt on the table, and I was left alone.
This wasn’t uncommon. They always made me wait. Always made me sit and wonder what that day's session would entail. My imagination never compared to the cruelty of reality, but worry could be its own form of torture.
While I waited, I always used the wait time to steel myself. I rested my head on my arms where the chain had been attached to the heavy metal table and closed my eyes, breathing deeply, trying to calm my racing heart and overactive mind. No matter how many times they took me away, it was still hard to let that fear go and enter that safe place in my head.
I had been taught to center myself during training with Father, to enter my peaceful center where I felt nothing so they wouldn’t get a reaction out of me. I had only put it into actual practice with recent events, and it was sometimes more challenging than others to achieve, but it became easier as the days passed.
The first time I managed it, I thought I had died when my deceased mother smiled sadly at me from inside my own head. She kept telling me it wasn’t time to give up.
Seeing her made me want to give up even more, knowing it meant I could be with her and Father again. But I never stopped trying. They would not break me.
