1Cavalry

Krell had always thought that the notions of dungeons were exaggerated. On the screens, there were always convicts with overgrown facial hair and tightly manacled appendages, attached to a wall covered in fine green fuzz that one did not want to touch for the sake of their health. There were the backed up toilets, the collapsing mattresses, the hulking roommates, the dreadful food…Imagine her astonishment when she realized that the screens did not entirely lie; if anything, they made prison out to be more appealing.

After the first week, her palate had grown numbly accustomed to the gruel and the bitter water enriched with vitamins. She was able to sit comfortably enough with her back to the wall so that her wrists did not bleed from the shackles. Even her eyes had adjusted to the jagged shadows that marred the floor with criss-cross patterns, giving way to other segments of light that shown through the one window in her cell. That one window, she had assumed, would be her means of escape.

It was clearly big enough for her slim frame to fit through. Her body’s possession of some flexibility and lack of curves were fit for an easy departure, and if it weren’t for the mesh of wire across the opening, freedom would not have been a goal, but a reality. The wire was barbed, and Krell had scabs on her fingers as evidence of her futile efforts to pry it loose.

Now, she sat dejectedly against the wall, ignoring the trickling sensation of the dripping water heading from her shoulder to her elbow, carrying with it, she thought hopefully, some sort of fatal disease. Her thoughts strayed without warning from mindless passing of the seconds to consideration of her predicament. So young, the officers had remarked. Their faces had not been incredulous, but merely calculating, assessing this newcomer and dismissing her just as quickly. Her age was of a mild surprise, perhaps curious amusement. Their concern, however, was not how she would fare in the harsh, biting cold of the cells; it was how long she would fare, at all. The betting had begun. Already, men had lost countless coins over her perseverance in clinging to life.

She knew why she was able to do so without meeting the fate of so many others; the others who she could hear at night scratching across from her cell. They eventually stopped scratching, and the next morning, the collectors would come to bear an indiscernible shape through the underground fog and up to the fortress. She knew why those shapes never moved, and she knew why she would not be joining their number.

She held the gene. It tingled between her fingers, and when it was needed, it could emerge through their tips: the forbidden power of life. The forbidden power of life had not been the surprise, however. The surprise was that they had known, and that they had come to get her as soon as she demonstrated it. The gene was a promoter of life, and as such, was the greatest weapon in this time of death.

“So young. Should we keep her in there? You know it’s down there.”

“Tchah, it won’t bother her. It’s mad, yah, but it’s got them chains. Them chains.” The officers had laughed after this, and Krell still didn’t see why ‘them chains’ were so funny. They enjoyed the bondage of those they never saw, after throwing them into the gloom. The clinking of the shackles must have been audible through the grid above the expanse of dungeon. They could hear it.

Krell never clinked her shackles.