Cage
It was dark.
A small sliver of light crept in from somewhere off in the distance, like the thin sliver of light underneath a door to the outside. But there was no outside. There was no inside either; there just was what was all around him, and that was darkness. The air had a stench to it like rotting overripe fruit, far fallen off the tree and baking in the deep summer heat. The sickly sweet aroma drifted in a breeze that was not there, and floated into his nostrils that he was no longer sure drew any clean breath.
He blinked, but he wasn’t sure why. He could see the same amount with his eyes closed as they were open. He may as well just leave them closed, and not waste the energy teasing his mind. At least if his eyes were closed it was easier to stop imagining that he saw shapes moving in the dark. If his eyes were closed, his mind would know that there was nothing to see at all, and they would vanish. But it was a shame he could not close his ears as well. Distant scraping sounds echoed off the wall-less cavern somewhere, the sound of iron being dragged against stone over and over again. Occasionally he thought he heard a scream, but it was so faint it might be mistaken for the escape of air from his lungs through clenched teeth. He himself had stopped screaming long since.
Raising his hands for what seemed to be the millionth time, he stretched his fingers in front of them and clasped them around the fence of his new home. Iron bars that extended only inches above his head where he sat. Standing up was impossible. The feeling of cold metal on his hands was the only sensation available to him. The temperature was so average it sometimes felt like a penetrating sense of nothingness, as if he existed where something should not exist at all. But the metal was cool to the touch, and so he kept grasping it so, to have some indication that he was still, in fact, alive.
There were no indications as to how long he had been here. Without sun or moon, without seasons, there was no way to tell the passage of time. At first he had taken to counting seconds. After he had passed two weeks without sleep, simply reciting numbers, he soon fell silent himself, and with it the hands on his imaginary clock ceased to move forward. Perhaps time had stopped, after all. In fact, it was almost certain. He felt no thirst nor hunger, yet it must have been far beyond his body’s expiration point without sustenance. Yet he was used to strange phenomena in this place. He just never had so much time – time? – to consider just how backwards it all was.
Irritation washed over him like a flood. He desperately longed for the simplicity that had been his life before this cage. One-on-one combat between him and the Darkness. Not necessarily good and evil – he was a far cry from good – but it was two opposing forces locked in a game of mutual exclusivity. If one won, the other must lose. There was no compromise, there was no quarter. Here, though, here in this wasteland of nothingness in a cage of iron that he could not break, there was no enemy. The Beast did not put him here; the Beast had nothing to do with his current situation. Very likely the Darkness was still roving the Abyss, gathering strength and hunting him hungrily, building his forces while he wasted away to nothingness behind a device of his own making.
His own making. Had he ever thought of that before? It seemed to him that he had just awoken to find himself sitting crouched uncomfortably in a cage, with no warning beforehand and no explanation after. None had come to question him, none to taunt him, and none to kill him. There was nobody else at all.
Suddenly, his head began to buzz as though someone was introducing a small electrical current through the base of his brain. Memories began to erupt from nowhere, painfully wrenching their way to the surface of his mind. He saw his hands – had he worn dark gauntlets like that before? – holding a blacksmith’s hammer, pounding away at hot white metal. He saw his feet working a grinding wheel as he sharpened something unidentifiable. Sweat poured down his face as he used blue-colored fire from somewhere to weld stout iron bars to a thick, solid platform, a bar every few inches around the entire outer area. His mouth worked furiously around a tight jaw and a vicious, twisted smile, but no words that he could understand came from his own throat. It was as if he was possessed by a demon that had not understood how to use the speech of his newest vessel.
As suddenly as the images came back to him, leaping up from the far recesses of his memory, they vanished. His eyes were certainly open now, staring at the small sliver of light that he could still see off in the distance. There was no mistaking the sound of his own lungs and the shivering of his own body, as if he had scaled a mountain naked in the dead of winter. He felt bruises forming on both of his palms, where he gripped the bars of his cage so tightly he was unable to make himself let go. But he did not want to let go. The memories of what he had done, the pain of not understanding why, rippled through him like waves of heat from an explosion. He started to shake the bars violently, rocking back and forth on his heels. A sound began in his throat – the first he had made since he had stopped counting the seconds – and evolved into something that he could not describe. A roar, perhaps, or a wail of despair, drowned out the distant scraping, drowned out the beating of his own heart. All of the air flew from his lungs in such a frantic hurry that the sound stopped suddenly enough for him to hear…a screech? A squeak? The all-too-familiar sound of metal-on-metal? But there were no swords here, no weapons that he could see.
Finding himself frozen, he eased his mouth shut and slowly pried his hands away from the bars. As he did so, one of the bars moved slightly, offering him a repeat performance of the sound he had questioned a moment before. He moved his hand back to the bar instantly, experimentally pushing back and forth and making a symphony of creaks echo in the distance.
As the bar came loose in his hands, he started counting the seconds as they went by.