Make a racket. You need to find out your circumstances, and perhaps someone will hear.
You thrash every part of you that will bend and snap, crying out without words and hurling your body back against the wall, using the give of your spine. The pain is nothing to what haloes the silver plate in your forehead.
There are footsteps, just audible beyond the roaring of blood and ice crackle in your ears, and you feel you are reeling them in with your writhing, each new exertion a hook you drive into the soles of those feet and pull tight. The steps stop, a blurred echo to the sound that suggests- yes- they stand just there, in front of your cell, throwing out a loose ball of body-sound that smatters over your unshapen ears. You hear the click of a lighter. Somewhere on the unimaginable other side of the wall- the wall the bars, now visible, trickle away into- a torch has sighed and flared.
A key scrapes then clicks, and a portion of the bars swing inwards, the shadows uncurling and scrabbling away over your not-human face like the feet of rats, running on bodilessly when they are plucked at the ball joint. There is a long moment before two bare feet pass the threshold.
You look at them, look up. A slight body in a loose red tunic lobstered with dark boiled leather plate cupped by steel pauldrons. A lean face, youthful but half-hidden by salt-and-pepper hair, falling in snaky, faintly mottled coils to the blocky metal shoulders.
What now?
Written by ouroboros666 on 19 July 2016
