Pain Prism

Dark. Cold. Alone. They had beaten it out of him, the last glimpse of happiness and hope he had. Grim realization had left the prisoner more lonely than he had felt for years, but it was only a moment of vulnerability rapidly consumed by darkness. It was hard to describe the change, but he had shut off from the world, indifference strangling his thoughts. The outcast now craved the chilling silence. Prisoner yearned for the darkness, the tastelessness, the emptiness. It was the closest he could get to death without feeling like he was leaving business left undone, or worse: giving these fools what they wanted.

They wanted to break him, and perhaps they had.

Prisoner rested with his knees on the ground, his spine pressed against the stiff, gelid bark of a lone tree, and his hands bound around its trunk carefully. His mind was blank. Fractured. His head was bowed, eyes burning into the soil like fire. He couldn’t help but notice the icy, stinging moisture that rose from the ground, though if he was honest with himself, he started liking the pain the moment her face faded. The moment his family dissolved into the night, as if they had never even existed.

Prisoner let loose a blood-curdling smile, dried crimson accenting his grin from a broken and bloodied face.

He had sat in emptiness for hours, tied to his fate. Dread had begun to sprout early on, but it’s growth paused, and receded. The overpowering fires of rage and vengeance dried his heart into a nearly uninhabitable desert. Not even trepidation could survive it. Scorching days and frozen nights uprooted his morals, withered his love and attachment to the world around him. What grew and existed now was hostile. It survived on very little from its environment. Wrath and hate existed like predators, starvation turning them voracious, eager for prey. Sleeping bodies rested peacefully in the clearing before him, like fresh meat.

Beady eyes excoriated the world around him, revealing not dozing men, but sin and sacrilege. Piles and piles of it.

Prisoner had plenty of time to find the man who had taken his staff. An owl hooted in the night, and not soon after its monotonous lullaby, the faint whirring sound of an airborne knife kissed his ears only moments before he felt the blade bury itself in the knot that stayed his hands.

A deep breath. Frost. Nature. Fresh night air.

Prisoner felt the ropes loosen and slid his fingers up around the hilt of the blade, carefully removing the steel from its wooden perch. It wasn’t hard to finish the cuts, and heartbeats later his bloodied binds fell to the ground. The renegade’s cold gaze raked across sleeping bodies. Disgust and anger rose like bile in the back of his throat. Prisoner clenched his jaw tightly to keep from screaming out. He gripped his dagger violently to keep from burying it into the chest of the closest soldier.

An angry thought whispered through his mind like a cold breeze. A glance down at a stolen doll in one man’s satchel made his heart skip a beat. A sob could not escape gritted teeth and a tight-lipped frown.

Prisoner began stepping over men towards his staff, quiet and calm as a ghost in the night. His footsteps were like breaths. His gaze sucked in the scene around him like a black hole: cold, empty, and consuming. When his hands met the worn, wooden grip of his staff, he exhaled, feeling the chill of night embrace his tattered skin.

Nothing inspired forgiveness quite like revenge.