I.
The light that streamed through the single clerestory window high overhead was the color of bruised clouds. The bars upon it, which he counted over and over again, were visible as dark thin columns in front of the rippled glass, and likewise as ill-defined blobs behind it upon the outside. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 – he shifted his gaze as he examined his tepid thoughts, starting from the first one to the next, and to the next, until the last – and this again.
The inside bars, the outside bars – they were certainly the same, except that their situation before or behind the window produced different impressions. He examined the stark contrast of light and dark, the straight lines and the distorted outlines, his head angled upward as he sat on the floor of his cell with his back to the wall. It was the only thing to look at. Everything else was smooth concrete – the floor, the walls, the ceiling. These were almost completely shrouded in impenetrable shadow – for there was no light except from this window.
The passing of time in this place was different, completely different from the outside – for time did not pass as much as turn and loop upon itself, cycling mindlessly in a sort of austere routine of meditative dullness. The meagre food – barely edible, as you might imagine; the long passages of dumb silence; the struggle for warmth, being barefoot supplied only a threadbare uniform; the stale, festering air that you breathed day and night. It tested the very limits of the will and the body. Damas' military training, however, had prepared him, had steeled his temperament against such hardship.
He shifted himself a bit to relieve the pressure on his back, which had begun for the first time in his life to give him some pain. As a rule, he tried to move as little as possible to conserve his energy. At first, he had exercised vigorously every day - as best he could given the circumstances – but soon, due to the poor diet, his toned muscle wasted away and he realized that he had better not push himself.
His body was in survival mode. How long had it been now? He had no way of knowing for sure. What was going on on the outside? He was wasting away in this hellhole, but the thing that angered him most was that he was unable to do anything from inside to stop Baron Praxis. What had become of his son? Had he reached the safehouse? He had heard nothing since the day he was imprisoned.
The Baron had won - for now. But he never lingered long on such thoughts. He would dismiss them weakly, giving a low grunt and shaking his head. They were too painful - the uncertainty too distressing.
Well, perhaps 'distressing' is not the right word – for Damas, the stoic though merciful ruler, was but rarely distressed. Rather, these uncertainties touched the great black void within him, the microcosm that his training and duties have over his life had buried, so to speak, curtained with a blank nothingness. And yet – behind it, the pulse of life still beat; he flinched inwardly whenever his thoughts approached it, for he could not fail to register a pointed jolt, as if an open wound were being prodded, whenever he trod its perimeter - never daring to lay his gaze directly upon it, the small though dense core of his vulnerability that, through everything, still lay intact in the murky depths of his conscience.
Back and forth, back and forth over the well-trodden paths of his past he went in the minutest detail, over every situation that had led to the present state of affairs, turning the facts as they stood this way and that, examining them mistrustfully. Every betrayal, every misfortune and every victory - he turned all this over and then over again.
He was, by nature, not one to wallow in self-pity or misery, and such was not the point of these forays into the cold, unfathomable waters of the past - for he was of an analytical bent and sought to learn, if he could, from the wild meanderings that Fortune and Fate had taken up to the present. These ruminations helped him shape some nebulous outline for the future, predicated on the uncertainty of his eventual freedom. Much could happen between now and then - whenever 'then' would end up being.
Two sharp blows to the door punctured the fragile bubble of his contemplations. He snapped his head towards the door. The same thing every evening - the small flap through which he received his rations was lifted open. The sickly green light from the hallway was visible momentarily. A small, short bowl was shoved through it, and the flap closed as quickly as it had opened.
He turned his head back and grunted under his breath. He did not want to eat, somehow out of a vague sense of wanting to spite the orderly operations of the prison. He knew he would anyways. He lifted his head again, trying to catch the last of the dying daylight as it fell weakly on his face. It had dimmed noticeably; there was not much time left before… but he did not want to think of the coming darkness. It will come tonight as surely as it had every night before.