11 | Yaron
Shadow Dungeons
I crouch in the central corridor wearing the legs of my beast, at least the lower half. My trousers torn open at the knees and around the upper thighs. Her family was moved to a lower rung of the dungeons after they were found where daylight does not exist. It was not an order I gave, but I would have given it. Only a fool would return them to the dungeons they escaped from the first time. I am impressed that they are all still alive.
Their escape attempt was riddled with difficulties — a hard fall, a long swim, a sharp climb, and that’s all before they began running for their lives across the farmlands and fields, then through Paradise Hole. Then, the rains got to them and forced them to stop and seek shelter. They made it to shelter, or so I’m told. They hid for a full day in the abandoned ruins of the former Shadow Keep’s church — not the one I burned, but one found within Paradise Hole that was abandoned generations ago, a fact I found rather…sad for reasons I have chosen not to explore further.
Though they were in poor shape when I last saw them, they were alive, but they seem to be deteriorating now. Out of the elements, out of danger’s direct path, in the dry cells in which they have been placed. Each one occupies a different cell and each cell is four walls, no windows and a heavy wooden door. The only truly salient difference between their first arrest and now is that they were together then. They have been separated now.
Fed and watered, offered paltry linens to sleep beneath and rushes to sleep upon, yet it is now that they fall apart. I can hear their sobs, their cries for each other through the thick walls. No, my beast can hear them. The walls down here are well insulated. There is no chance they’d be able to hear anything other than distant sounds of sorrow.
I rub my face roughly, feeling uncharacteristically uncertain, and sit there a moment more. Then I rise on two human legs and walk up the way I descended, back up the narrow, jagged stair. And as I eventually emerge into the light of a torch-lit castle, I carry with me a dangerous thought: mercy.