The Wretch
“Thou who art poor, who art hungry, who art alone, come to Siradorn. For we accept all of strong backs, of untapped talent, and of righteous conviction.”
-Earl Julius, on the topic of refugees.
The sounds of the thick oak door creaking open are amplified tenfold by the stone brick construction of the dungeon. Ancient hinges, unoiled and time-worn, protest with a symphony of squeaks and squeals that border on being a long and tired groan. Flickering orange torchlight cuts through the darkness, illuminating a pair of yellow, bloodshot eyes that linger behind a set of rusted iron bars.
A heavy grunt reverberates throughout the room as a guard forces the door the remainder of the way open, cursing as he jams his torch in a nearby sconce. His well-polished steel chest plate and helmet reflect the dim light, creating strange shadows in the prison’s lone cell. His eyes are shadowed, but the look of disgust is plain as he unsuccessfully tries to ignore the stench of sweat and excrement while approaching the bars.
“Supper,” says the guard, raising a large piece of hastily butchered meat up to the cell door. It’s fresh; drippings of red juices splatter on the soiled bricks of the dungeon, while the yellow fat clinging to its edges betray its equine origins. He steps back slightly as the occupant of the cell crawls forward on all fours. If only for the dim light of the torch and the haunched figure of the prisoner, one could not be faulted for thinking that they stood before a normal man.
But then he shifts. Slowly the creature rises from crawling to standing while approaching the bars, betraying the inhuman-ness of his form. His legs are bent at strange angles, more dog-like than man, though his feet still retain some semblance of humanity. His arms hang too low at his sides so that the tips of his fingers brush against his knobbed knees. He stands hunched, yet even so, his bald head nearly brushes against the ceiling of his cell.
The guard has to crane his neck slightly to meet the eyes of the beast, which are far too wide for a normal man’s. His mouth is too large, with thin red lips that seem to stretch beyond the lobes of his long ears.
”By the Maker, I think you must be even uglier than when I saw you last, wretch,” the guard chuckles, barely covering his fear with a thin layer of bravado. “Goodness me, look at you–I can see straight to your ribs. You must be starving,” he says mockingly, “It’s only been, what, a week? But worry not, I have your dinner right here, freak,” he tosses the chunk of meat through the bars so that it lands at the creature’s feet, careful to not get any closer than he needs to be, before turning to leave.
”Oh, and I almost forgot,” he begins to snort heavily, nearly retching as he works to form a thick ball of mucus and phlegm before spitting it onto the prisoner’s meal with a practiced aim. The wretch looks at it briefly before turning his attention back to the guard, its bloodshot eyes betraying neither disgust nor anger–only the cold, calculating look of an intelligent predator.
"Not yet," says a soft, beguiling voice, resonating within the creature’s skull, compelling it to remain still. Though its eyes remained locked with that of the guards’, who held its gaze for a moment before a combination of fear and revulsion forced him to turn away.
”I hate this bloody job,” he mumbles and he snatches his torch from its sconce and drags the heavy door shut behind him. The sound of several bolts being slid into position echoes off the stone as the wretch’s eyes re-adjust to the darkness. The creature rests on its haunches as it pinches the soiled meat between its thumb and forefinger, examining it for a moment before tossing it onto the pile with the rest of the rotting horseflesh. The gnawing hunger in his stomach grows a little stronger with each passing moment.
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"Soon, Child."
The rats paid him no mind, skittering across his thighs as he sat in the utter darkness of the cell. The sounds of their teeth gnawing on the mound of meat in the corner gave him something to focus his mind upon. The ever-growing pains in his stomach gave him some indication of time since the guard had last come. The length between visits was becoming longer, though he did not know why they came at all–why not leave him to rot in his cell? He could find no clear reason, though it seemed to him a waste of perfectly good horses. Why imprison him at all when they could just easily have killed him?
Though he had begun to wonder just how easily he could be killed.
He had been imprisoned for–he looked towards the pile of meat festering in the corner, crawling with rats, a morbid hourglass of sorts–and judged that it had been nearly two months since he had last eaten. He shuddered as he remembered his first and last attempt at consuming the meals of horseflesh. For the first two days, he could not bring himself to eat the raw slabs of meat delivered to his cell–he would rather starve. That is, until he began to. On the third day, these ragged scraps of equine steaks began to look like the most choice cuts of beef he had ever seen. He brought one to his mouth with two trembling hands and tore chunks in a starved frenzy of teeth before promptly spitting them back out in a panic. Not for the taste, but for the pain; it burned, searing the inside of his mouth, blistering his tongue and throat, closing it such that he could not scream out the agony he endured. All this pain from just brief contact with the meat; he did not dare try to taste it again, carefully pinching it between his fingers for fear of it causing him to break out in burning hives.
However intense the stabbing pain in his stomach grew, it was nothing compared to what a small bite of animal flesh would do. He could endure and he did; not eating even a morsel of food for nearly two months. While enduring starvation for this long would’ve surely killed any human, the prisoner persisted. More than persisted, he grew. In both strength and size. When once the prisoner’s fingertips could hardly scrape the ceiling when he stretched to his full extent, he now had to remain hunched over to stand comfortably within. He recalled how feeble he was: arms and legs shaking from the effort it took to simply crawl towards the iron bars of his cell and beg for water. Weeks passed, and unexpectedly he began to feel powerful, as if he could sprint through the stone brick walls of the dungeon with little resistance. Out of curiosity and a stark lack of anything to do, he decided to test this newfound sense of brawn against the bars of his cell which had taunted him relentlessly since his imprisonment. Grabbing a bar in each hand, he braced himself against the floor, his feet firmly planted as they could be on the cold, soiled bricks, and gave a mighty pull. His new, twisted muscles rippled with effort and he felt a warning twinge of pain in his back as he heard the iron begin to groan and creak under the stress; however, for all his might, he could not bend them out of place. He would spend the remainder of the day looking for and testing various weak points in his cell: the hinges of the cell door, crumbling masonry, or particularly rusted bars. He struggled and strained against all of these to no avail. He would have to find another way.
This was a week ago. Now, he could feel his metamorphosis coming to an end; the changes in strength, size, and form gradually slowing to their eventual conclusion. He knew now that he could have pulled that mocking guard through the bars of his cell, using them to squeeze his body out of that plate armor like a wet towel through a set of rollers. He nearly had, before that strange voice brought him to a halt. Up to that moment, he had waved the voice off as no more than a mere auditory hallucination, some far-off sound that seemed to come nearer as he progressed through his transformation. It never offered more than a passing comfort after the strange and terrible dreams that tormented him whenever he found a brief moment of sleep, a quick “there, there, Child,” and nothing more. However, no simple hallucination could force your limbs to freeze mid-action on a whim. This voice was something more than a kind whisper in the dark.
It told him to wait, hinting that his freedom was near yet that he was not quite ready to take it. He would disagree, though he sensed that his opinion held little weight in the matter. His burning desire for freedom had now been replaced by the silent confidence the voice imparted upon him. It would only be a matter of time before he breathed fresh air.
