The only light the elderly slave had to see by was that of an iridescent deep water fish. He had clutched it in his deformed fist before he entered the caves, as it scampered by. Coal black darkness blanketed the boiling waters around his wounded and worn, frail merbody. In the five months since his capture, Amaranth had been reduced to a fragment of what he once was; forced to pry free and capture drying malta shells from the sweltering aquatic mines beneath Meridia. Skin peeled loose from his body where lava thrashed from the walls and scoured him.
Soon the tailfinned men from Sangfoul would dub him useless, and extinguish his life flame. His left leg thumped numbly against the cavern wall. It had become a sort of companion for him as it followed him around, his body no longer able to feel its presence. Globules of blood bubbled from his lips and he licked them up with his tongue, quickly swallowing them. Salt, he thought, I need it.
“…where are you now…” he whispered, his crooked fingertips caressing the chilled stone cavern wall before him in search for some crevice he had once known to be there.
“oooooo” something cooed from the other side of the wall, in an undiscovered cavern beyond his own.
“…ahay…” Amaranth’s shell of a mouth grinned, shattered teeth exposed. “…and in this dawning hour, before the death partakes of something, shall I give thee to bring thy master’s make…”
“oooooo” the thing sang back.
“…with swiftness find thy master, for in him lay saving’s stakes…” Amaranth’s crooked fingers frantically searched his whale-leather clad body for something he barely knew was there. The boiling waters licked his form. His knuckle popped and echoed as he loosed something from his clothes and stuffed it through the wall’s crevice. “…shall journey have thou at now friend…” Amaranth muttered.
Nothing replied, only currents along the ears.
Currents swept past his bloodshot eyes, as slowly Amaranth maneuvered his way back to the main mining room. With only one working leg-fin he spun as he went, his leg thumping each time it clubbed the wall. “…companion…” he whispered to it. “…less the make noise…” The sound echoed through the cavern’s hull.
Deep red light bloomed before him as the mining room neared. Tiny crimson streams of lava trickled loose from the walls, to scorch his boiled, peeling flesh. A man inside the room ahead wailed, as the guards beheaded him for being unable to work. Me left not long, the shell of Amaranth thought to itself.
A coral club boomed against his skull and all red became darkness. All sound became silence. All thoughts eclipsed.
__________
Cardonea Tower
Morn’s light lit the ocean’s surface a crisp fiery hue as Illala awoke to the new day. She swirled in the waters to unwrap the sleeping kelp that had shielded her from the cool of night. That color, the crisp flame light, paralleled her life as of late, she thought.
Here was the beauty of the crimson sunrise, a parallel of her newfound life and sense of family with Evanshade, a parallel of the gift of the child that had been growing inside her for five months now. Her belly had puffed up like a blowfish. As she rested she felt the baby kicking at her stomach and thought sometimes she could feel its heartbeat.
Then there was the eerie flame hue this particular sunrise took on. It reminded Illala of the tragedy all about her that was the very reason she had come to know the things she was growing to love.
Cardonea Tower remained the only place she had been since her arrival back home. And when Evanshade was there in the room with her, he showered her with loving words and warmth that she had never known in a man before. He constantly told her of his excitement: that soon she would give birth to their child.
“Soon I will give up my life as a warrior and we will be free to live where we please in the open waters and raise our family,” Evanshade had said. But surely the people of Sangfoul would come after him for leaving their ranks, or her own fellow Meridians would take his life for leading the attack on their people?
Or maybe Illala herself would take Evanshade’s life in the end. After all, he stood by as his warriors slew her parents and siblings. She had grown to love him, but deep inside a hatred burned for what he had taken from her.
A constant reminder of the tragedy surrounding her life loomed in the room below. Odyssey, the man had called himself. He had been imprisoned there.
But in many light risings and fallings Illala had not spoken to him or even heard his moans; even though her senses had enhanced in these months of pregnancy.
What she did notice, that Evanshade appeared not to, was the constant smell of rotting, seeping up from below. Only one explanation could be given; Odyssey’s corpse was there, rotting in its own mire, spewing its toxins.
I failed to find Odyssey freedom and now each day I am haunted by his body’s stench, Illala thought while looking upon the eerie sunrise dancing upon the ocean’s surface above.
Then something interrupted her morning thoughts.
Thump! The floor beneath her faintly sang. Thump! Thump!
Urgently she swam to the chilly floor, where she knew the familiar brick she would find was, that she could use to see what was happening beneath. The brick’s edges gripped tight in her fingertips’ grasp, grinding on her nails as it attempted to slip away.
With all her strength Illala managed to loose it from the floor’s grasp, her pregnant body gliding backward in the waters as the brick dislodged. Some of the rank odor that emulated from the room below seemed to be dissipating.
Illala quickly maneuvered herself so she could see into the room below. “Odyssey?” she whispered through the opening. “Do you live? I could have sworn you dead.”
“…odyssey…” a whisper replied.
It was the whisper of an unfamiliar voice. Something jerked and swerved in the room below, serpent like in nature.
“Who are you?” Illala spoke louder now. “And where is Odyssey?”
“…and as naming one thing of lays away another takes its form…” the voice spoke. “…fitting name of odyssey and so now am of i…”
As the thing babbled on, Illala’s eyes adjusted. As it spoke the thing batted a glowing fish, like a cat playing with its toy. The deformed creature jerked and squirmed, its knuckles popping as it pawed the lifeless fish. Boils broke about the malnourished man’s face.
Illala shuddered with repulsion and quickly slid the brick into its hole. They must have disposed of Odyssey’s body to make room to imprison another of their slaves, too deformed to work, she thought. I don’t recognize him. Thank goodness he is no-one I have ever known.
As much as she tried to deny it, there was something familiar about the old deformed creature. But whatever it was that Illala recognized, the being’s true self had obviously passed from its mind long before entering the rank cell below.