V. Learning
With nine you're old enough to understand that you can't simply leave through the front door. So you start to watch. You study the templars as if they're just another class you have to attend. You learn which ones look more often away than others, which ones are just and which ones answer every wrong move with hits and punishments.
You get into trouble every other day – when you sneak through the hallways in search of a way out, when you provoke the guards just to see how they react. You lose most of the friends you got over the last year, but it doesn't matter. At least you wouldn't have to say goodbye to them when you're ready to leave.
VI. Nightmares
Two days after your tenth birthday you try to escape again. You know when there are no templars guarding the little door in the kitchen that leads into the small garden that seems like paradise to you. You melt the lock and the first step out of the tower is like a dream. It's spring but the night is warm and the flowers smell like a long forgotten time. Not once in the last five years did you see the sky without thick glass and a thousand rules separating it from you. Not once were you this free, just standing in that doorway, the whole world laying in front of you.
When you hear them behind you it is too late. You start running nonetheless, straight into the lake. The cold water is full of broken promises. It doesn't take them a minute to catch you, but it's enough to fill your heart with a new kind of longing.
They beat you up and lock you in a cell. There's no window and you hear nothing. Still you think the world's calling for you. After a week they let you out. Your voice is nothing more than a hoarse whisper and your hands are bleeding from all the scraping and hammering against walls that won't give you free. They laugh about your eyes that are filled with fear, still seeing the images that haunted you at night. And you know those nightmares won't go away, no matter how long you wait.
tbc