Stay patient- bide your time
You wait in silence, counting out the minutes in a long and fleeing stream of consciousness. Every so often, you rotate your wrists just a little, enough to stop the silver burning through to the bone. But you are acting entirely on motor memory. You see no reason to fight it. Maybe everyone is born in the dark knowing how to count the minutes.
What are you waiting for?
Nothing. Waiting is a way to give yourself purpose. To forget to panic.
But you don’t know that. The voice that said those words was not your own voice. And you think you have forgotten too much.
You are about to let the silver tear into both wrists when you hear the noises, far away but moving closer. Then torchlight blooms yellow on the blank wall a few paces beyond your bars, and you hear voices, speaking some language you know:
“Filthy Witcher scum.”
“Not in front of the ladies, Teddy. All sweet asleep in their chains, they are. Dreaming silver dreams.”
“I tell you, it’s not right-“
You see three people walking slow into view of your cell- two of them heavyset guards, one a little smaller and paler, half-dragging, half-carrying the third. Your slitted eyes wince back. Red. As if she has been painted all over- red for newly dead- and is now being dragged down to hell. Muscle glistens in strips across the cheekbones of an unidentifiable face. Your eyes meet, her blue ones shining from the bath of red and yours- you wouldn’t know the colour of your eyes.
In a movement so fast you hardly follow it, she jams her fingers into the eye sockets of the left-hand guard and throws herself on your bars.
“I knew… I knew you were…”
You spit words past your half-grown muzzle, needing to know.
“Who?”
Loops of black fluid shoot suddenly over her peeled knuckles, spread wide like the broad blade of a razor, and punch through the throat of the guard who lunged at her. The other, the one she hurt, huddles on the floor.
“Revenge our lost duke! Revenge Antonius and your fellow Witchers! Live… Find the Monkshood… Revenge us both…”
She is staring past you, unseeing. The black fluid spools into the air from every abused scrap of her flesh, and worms between the bars of your cage, decaying them to black-rusted stumps. It mists into dark steam as it hits silver, but she shudders and pours out more, screaming and screaming as you find yourself freed.
Her blue eyes roll upwards, and she crumbles to dust.
Act quickly.
Written by ouroboros666 on 13 July 2016