Matt paced the perimeter of the cell, glancing at the door every time he passed by. The minutes dragged by, turning into hours that felt more like days. He would sit for a moment, before another scream inevitably rang out, causing him to return to retracing his circuit.

  Finally, the door leading to the control room opened. Matt’s head snapped up to see a bloody, disfigured, and disheveled Raymond dragging the even bloodier body of Alex behind him by the hair. For one terrifying moment, Matt thought the boy was dead until he heard a soft moan come from him when Raymond let go of his hair, unceremoniously dropping him on the ground.

  Although he was caked in blood, Raymond must have fully healed him because Matt couldn’t see any wounds on the boy. Raymond on the other hand, looked as though he had let someone hit him in the face with a brick repeatedly. Judging, by the dark expression on his face: that someone had been Alex.

  Matt laughed loudly and pointed at Raymond's misshapen face. It was obvious that Raymond had already healed most of the injuries, but the damage must have been so severe that he needed to do it in stages. His top lip was still split and swollen, but his cheeks and nose were comically thin and uneven as though the tip of his face was made of clay and pinched by an incorrigible child. Both of his eyes were bloodshot, but the left eye had that blind, milky sheen over the pupil and iris you’d often see in a corpse.

  Gods! The crazy bastard almost took out Raymond with a single blow. Judging by the placement and severity of the injury, Alex must have used the enchanted manacles to enhance the force of his attack – otherwise he wouldn’t have had the strength needed. Raymond’s bronze rank reflexes were probably the only reason he was still alive.

  “How the hell do you look worse than he does?” Matt asked gleefully. “You do know how torture is supposed to work, right? You’re supposed to do that to him. How does a mundy get the drop on a bronze rank 'adventurer'?” He continued, stressing the last word with a sardonic sneer.

  Matt always hated the slurs for people without magic – mundies, norms, peasants, hollows, womps, and lessences were a few of the more common, less colorful ones he had heard – but he used one now knowing that it would drive another needle into the pincushion that had to be Raymond's pride right about now.

  Without warning, Raymond raised the rod and shot another blue burst of magic at him, but Matt was ready for it this time and barely received a glancing blow to his leg as he dodged out of the way. It still put him on his ass as his entire leg went numb though, and Raymond wasted no time raising a section of the bars to the cell while Matt was incapacitated. In a rush, he threw Alex inside the cell and went out the door leading to the library without another word before the bars were fully lowered back in place.

  “Ach! Dick!” Matt called after him, gingerly massaging the seized muscles in his leg. “I hate lightening magic.”

  When his muscles finally loosened enough for him to move, Matt hobbled over to Alex and collapsed next to him.

  “Alex, are you okay?”

  Matt patted him down thoroughly for injuries, unbothered by the gore staining his own hands and Alex’s complete nudity. Alex groaned weakly as he was rolled onto his side, but under all the blood, there appeared to be no injuries. Alex groaned again as he was rolled onto his back, and he slapped Matt’s wandering hands away.

  “At least buy me dinner first.” Alex said in a rough, groggy voice.

  He attempted to sit up but quickly gave up, sprawling on his back with his arms spread, leaving a dark smear on the bright floor like a bloody snow angel.

  “Are you still hurt anywhere? There’s so much blood, it's hard to tell.” Matt asked as Alex swatted at his hands again.

  “Huh? Oh, yeah.” He said absentmindedly, He examined a blood-soaked hand before vaguely gesturing to his body. “I uh, I think I stubbed my toe.”

  Matt laughed but it was as hollow as the expression on Alex’s face. Both men knew the humor was only a facade. A family photo with strained smiles hung on a wall to cover the fist-sized holes and blood splatter from last night’s drunken outburst. Sometimes was better to simply straighten the portrait and move on, so Matt let it go.

  “How long was I...?” Alex trailed off, as if he was barely interested in an answer. As if he wasn’t analyzing every inch of that canvas, itching to tear it off the wall and smash it to splinters.

  “You must be exhausted, why don’t you get some sleep?” Matt said with a wince, and it tasted like cowardice.

  Alex may be willing to talk about it, but Matt had always been uncomfortable with discussing or dealing with other people’s emotions.

  Combat training, situational awareness, battle tactics, he was good at those things. Hell, even providing ambiguous life lessons through mundane activities. But that was all in the context of preparation, not the aftermath. He wasn’t qualified for that, wasn’t built for it. He had saved countless people over the years from monsters, often meeting them on the very worst day of their lives, but when the monsters disappeared, so too would he.

  He enjoyed his work and found fulfillment in protecting the weak, but his job was to kill monsters – not help the victims pick up the pieces afterwards. Someone once told him that there was a difference between a grand gesture, and common decency. Despite it being delivered as a rebuke for his perceived callousness, Matt agreed with the sentiment.

  He had no illusions about what kind of man he was. He thought of himself as a good man, but he knew that he was not a great one. He was content with saving lives; he would leave the state of their minds and souls to the priests.

  “How long?” Alex said more forcibly. His prismatic eyes fierce as they stood out against all the dark red and brown.

  Matt sighed and shook his head.

  “Sleep for now.” He said, placing a hand on his shoulder and gently pushed him back to the ground when he tried to sit up. “Get some rest kid, I’ll watch over you.”

  He looked towards the door Raymond departed through for a long moment. If only Sylus had gotten here before Raymond, they could have avoided all of this. If only Alex could have been just a little bit faster. It wasn’t right to blame the kid, and he banished the thought before it even fully formed.

  There was a part of him - that mean, callous part that was pointed out to him so long ago – that wanted to kill Sylus as soon as they escaped on principle alone. He sowed the wind; let him reap the whirlwind.

  He would still do his best to save Mirelle once they were free, he would never lie about that or go back on his word after giving it. But unlike Sylus, Mirelle was innocent. She didn’t know what was really going on. Sure, she probably had some feeling that Sylus was hiding something – as most wives do when their husbands keep secrets. But was that enough to judge her as a guilty party?

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  He shelved the thought and turned his attention back to Alex, a deflection and an insistence to rest poised on the tip of his tongue – but Alex was already fast asleep. his arms and legs spread out as though he was basking in warm sunshine instead of rotting in a cold metal hell, naked and covered in his own blood.

  The next several of days blurred together into an amalgamation of time that was impossible to keep track of. One moment the minutes would tick by in what felt like hours, and then hours would vanish in the blink of an eye.

  Raymond would sporadically appear to taunt Alex for a few minutes before leaving again, but mercifully he seemed content on leaving both of them in the cell. After Alex recovered a little, he briefly told Matt what he did to Raymonds face before curling up on the floor and closing his eyes. Although Matt was impressed –and extremely amused – by a bronze ranker getting their faced caved in by a someone with only one essence, he knew that Raymond would not let that slide.

  However, the next time Raymond showed up, he appeared as if he had done just that. He set a plate of food and a jug of water down just inside the bars of the cell. But besides a few snide comments directed at Alex, he left without an incident.

  The days passed quietly, and Alex was starting to be more talkative, more animated. Their conversations became more frequent but rarely moved beyond surface level. Neither offered up personal information about their past nor asked follow up questions when the conversation inevitably steered in that direction. Despite their shallow conversations and responses to inane questions, they slowly warmed up to each other and were surprised at how well they got along.

  Thankfully, Raymond showed no more interest in Alex outside of taunting him. That is, until Alex hit him in the face with a piece of bread after he made a comment describing what the inside of Alex’s stomach felt like when he tried to eat.

  Raymond took him back to the ritual room within the hour and then again, the following day. Their cell had no access to sunlight, and the bright lights in the room were constantly on so it was hard to keep track of time. Despite that, Matt was sure that no more than a week has passed since Alex was first thrown in here with him.

  Alex had receded into himself after the third time he was taken. Spending the majority of the time sleeping or staring blankly at the ceiling, his lips twitching as though he was talking to himself.

  One day, Raymond came in holding a plate of food looking angry and slammed the plate on the floor just inside the cell.

  “Eat that, outworlder. I’ll not be blamed for your death, you hear me?” He snapped as though Alex had just accused him trying to starve him. His eyes flicking nervously from Alex to Matt before he stomped off towards the door leading to the control room and slamming it shut behind him.

  Alex watched him leave with a bewildered look.

  “The hell was that about?” Alex asked.

  He must have come really damn close to killing you and realized he would have to explain himself to Markov, Matt almost said.

  “You can’t give a reason to explain crazy.” He said instead. “You should try and eat something.”

  He pointed at the plate laden with strips of dried meat and a hunk of blackened bread. Alex laid his head back down as if he didn’t hear him, but the low grumbling sound from his stomach undercut his feigned indifference.

  Alex sighed in resignation and pushed himself to his feet. His whole body was completely caked in blood, but it did nothing to hide the fact that he was still completely naked. Matt had offered to make him a loincloth like the one he was wearing out of the clothes they had but Alex refused it with little more than a dismissive shrug.

  He shambled over to the food and brought it back to his spot, pausing long enough to offer some of the dried meat to Matt who waived it away.

  “I don’t need to eat food.”

  Alex’s eyebrow rose at that, but he shrugged and moved away in an exhausted shuffle. The clothes he was originally wearing were the kind of clothes you wore while relaxing in your own home. The fabric was soft, but far too thin to be used as bedding.

  Despite everything though, he still couldn't bring himself to use the ashaka outfit he got when he first arrived here or risk ruining the clothes Auntie Jane had given him. So, instead – like a psychopath – he took out the robes he looted from Katjav’s corpse in the library and placed it on the floor, only using the outfit Auntie Jane gave him as a makeshift pillow piled on top of his boots. He didn’t even fully realize what he did until hours later, when he found himself staring at the material, trying to figure out where it came from.

  Matt looked up in alarm when he scrambled towards the back corner of the cell and vomited noisily. Alex waived him away when he called out to him though, and Matt settled back down with a shrug.

  When Alex’s stomach appeared to have settled, he placed his hand on the wall and activated some kind of magical trigger Matt hadn’t known was there. A section of floor began to sink, including the area where he had vomited. A long rectangular section had dropped several inches, completely detached from the rest of the rest of the floor. Water burst from the ceiling directly above the lowered panel creating a contained waterfall in their cell.

  Matt’s mouth dropped open in surprise and he rushed over to stand beside Alex. The water continued to jet from the ceiling, draining off the sides of the lowered panel.

  “Do you think we could stand on that?” Matt asked, indicating to the platform. “There’s no soap, but it would be amazing to wash some of this off, right?”

  Matt grinned with excitement and nudged Alex with his elbow, waggling his eyebrows. Alex’s face remained impassive as he stared at the water disappearing into the gap created by the lowered panel before giving a noncommittal grunt in response.

  Matt’s smile faltered, but he didn’t say anything. Instead, he also turned his gaze to the water as they stood side by side in companionable silence. Alex opened his mouth, paused, and then slapped the trigger point on the wall again before returning to his bedding and laying down. The water stopped immediately, the panel slowly rising until it was once again flush with the rest of the mirrored floor of the cell.

  Matt watched him go with pursed lips before returning his attention to the spot on the wall Alex had touched. Standing this close to it, Matt could easily make out the magical control panel camouflaged as part of the stone wall, but he was positive it wasn’t there before – or at the very least it wasn’t active before.

  He had walked the perimeter of this cell every day, scouring every inch the stone wall in hopes of finding some kind of weakness to exploit but found nothing. Had Alex done something to activate it? Matt reached out a tentative finger and poked the wall, ready to jump backwards.

  A rectangular section of the mirrored floor turned a milky white and descended smoothly without making any noise. The water began to fall from the ceiling and Matt knelt beside the lowered panel, relishing the misty spray that landed on his skin. He resisted the urge to stick his head under the rainfall of water and peered through the gap that was created in between the panel and the rest of the floor. Water sluiced over the edges of the panel, the gap acting as a drain for the water, but it was nowhere big enough for him to squeeze through. The space beyond was pitch black and Matt had no idea how big the space under the cell was.

  Cautiously, he put his hand in the falling water and was surprised at the amount of pressure the water had. The water pelted his arm like tiny little fists, but he had so much dirt and gore caked on his body that he couldn’t even tell if the water was hot or cold. Balancing on one leg, he lowered his other foot and experimentally poked the lowered panel with a toe before jumping back, unsure if there were traps set up to stop people standing on it. When nothing happened, he slowly eased himself onto the platform until it was supporting his whole weight.

  Matt was so focused on making sure the panel didn’t drop him into the abyss, that he didn’t notice the stinging sensation on the back of his neck until he was sure that he wasn’t going to fall. Matt jumped out of the water with a yelp, trying to rub his back and shoulders. The water was blisteringly hot, and steam was starting to accumulate around the mini waterfall, obscuring the area inside the platform.

  Matt plunged his arms back into the water and began to scrub. The water wasn’t hot enough to harm him, but his body has been encased in a shell of hardened filth for so long that he was hypersensitive to the long-forgotten sensation.

  The clean skin of his arms began to poke through like rays of the sun piercing through a cloudy sky. Matt held up a completely clean hand for the first time in months and stared at it. The skin was red from the heat of the water and the vigorous scrubbing, but it was clean. Completely, gloriously, scrupulously, painfully, clean.

  Matt’s breath went suddenly ragged. For a moment, he thought that the steam coming from the water might be poisoned, but then realized that it was much, much worse. His eyes began to burn as something obscured his vision. Shame lanced through him, and he did something he didn’t even know he was still cable of: He began to weep.

  Hot tears spilled from his eyes, burning more than the water falling from this prison ever could. The muscles in his jaw clenched as he stifled a sob, and he stepped back onto the platform, letting the cooler water consume him as he became obscured behind a veil of smoke.