Eden, you might call it. Or hell, depending on your perspective.
But tell me, does it matter? Both are prisons in their own way.
A cocoon of damp stone and shadow, where time softened into a comforting blur.
Darkness didn't steal from me; it sheltered me, its embrace as intimate as a lover's.
The absence of sunlight wasn't a loss but a shield.
Down there, the outside world was irrelevant—
Stripped away until only she remained.
My mother, and the fortress of love she built around me, impenetrable and absolute.
I never dreamed of leaving.
Such thoughts were as foreign to me as the taste of freedom.
But that one day—
A day etched in the marrow of my memory—
Shattered my sanctuary.
I remember it too well.
The harbinger of nightmares.
The true beginning of my torment.
It started without fanfare.
No difference marked it from any other day.
I awoke to the familiar cadence of dungeon life—
The muffled screams, the echoing footfalls, the measured clink of chains.
These were my symphonies.
I had memorized their movements like a maestro—
The timing of the guards, the shuffle of their boots, the creak of wooden trays bearing our meagre rations.
Around this time, I would crawl to her lap, and she would sing.
Her voice, tender and unwavering, was my shield against the world's terrors.
But not that day.
The usual rhythm was broken.
The guards who should have arrived with our food didn't come.
No footsteps echoed down the corridor.
The screams—those sharp, jagged cries that punctuated the dungeon's stillness—were conspicuously absent.
The silence was deafening.
It was as if the dungeon itself had ceased to breathe,
Leaving only us—
Two living souls adrift in a suffocating void.
I looked to her—my mother—for answers.
Her unease was palpable, her hands trembling as she brushed a strand of hair from her face.
Yet beneath the worry, I sensed something foreign—an anticipation, faint but undeniable.
What was it?
Hope?
Fear?
A maddening cocktail of both?
Even at my young age, I felt it—
A subtle shift in the air,
The prelude to upheaval.
I wanted to shrink into her arms,
To bury myself in the only safety I had ever known.
But the dungeon had other plans.
Whatever was coming, I wanted no part of it.
Change was an unwelcome intruder.
My bliss, my heaven—
Why must it end?
The silence shattered.
Ah...
It began with footsteps—fast, deliberate, and foreign to the usual cadence of the dungeon.
They weren't the measured strides of the guards I knew—
The ones who delivered our daily meals and disappeared without a word.
No, these were urgent, purposeful—
An unfamiliar rhythm that jarred my senses.
I stiffened, my gaze darting to my mother.
She sat upright, her breath quickening as the sound grew closer.
Her hand reached for mine, firm but trembling, and in a low, urgent whisper, she said:
"Shh… stay quiet. Not a word."
And then, they arrived.
Ah, the faceless arbiters of fate.
Their movements spoke not of intent but of monotony—
A job performed, nothing more.
The clank of keys.
The scrape of metal.
The heavy groan of the door swinging open.
It was the sound of intrusion.
Of unwelcome change.
They entered with a force that was almost mechanical,
Their hands seizing us before we could fully comprehend what was happening.
My mother resisted, her voice calm yet firm.
"We can walk ourselves," she said, her tone carrying a dignity that defied her disheveled state.
The guards, perhaps out of impatience or indifference, relented, releasing their grip.
And then—
With a grace that seemed almost surreal in our grim surroundings—
She began to compose herself.
Her fingers moved with a curious precision, combing through her tangled hair
As though each strand carried the weight of her dignity.
How human, this futile ritual of dignity.
As if a combed strand of hair or a smoothed fold of fabric could alter the trajectory of what was to come.
Admirable, in a way.
But pointless.
She wiped at the grime on her cheeks—
Not to cleanse, but to reclaim something fleeting.
Something hers.
There was a rhythm to it, almost ritualistic—
As she smoothed her frayed robes, straightened their tired folds.
Defiance wrapped in gentility—
How very human.
When she turned to me, I stood rooted, entranced by the quiet strength in her movements.
And then, without hesitation, she turned that ritual upon me.
Her fingers brushed through my hair, tugging at tangles, her hands adjusting my tattered clothes.
In her silence, I felt the weight of her determination—
As if this small act could shield us from the storm ahead.
"Stand tall," she whispered, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands.
"We must look strong."
We followed the guards—
Half-running, half-walking—through the dim corridor.
My feet stumbled over the uneven stones,
But her grip on my hand was unyielding, pulling me forward.
The air grew lighter with each step,
The oppressive dampness of the dungeon giving way to something unfamiliar.
And then—
Like a sudden breach in a dam—
We emerged.
—————————
The outside came at me like a predator—ruthless, unrelenting.
The sky, vast and unforgiving, stretched above me—a thing so immense it mocked the safety of my cocoon. Its brightness seared my eyes, forcing them shut as I stumbled, shielding my face with trembling hands.
My sanctuary, my world of shadow and stone, was gone. I had not been freed. I had been exiled.
And I hated it.
Expelled into this glaring expanse, I felt naked and exposed. The dungeon's damp twilight had been my womb, and now the sky, vast and depthless, loomed above—a void that swallowed everything beneath it.
How did people endure such openness, such vulnerability? It poured down from above, relentless, inescapable.
I wondered how anyone could live under something so vast, so indifferent.
My senses revolted, each one waking with a ferocity I couldn't comprehend.
My ears, long dulled by the muffled echoes of stone and water, were assaulted by a cacophony of life.
Birds shrieked to one another, their calls sharp and jarring, slicing through the rustle of leaves in the breeze.
Wheels clattered over uneven roads.
Horses snorted.
And voices—real voices, not the agonized wails of the dying—filled the air with an unsettling normalcy.
It was too much.
I staggered, my stomach heaving, my knees trembling as the weight of this newfound existence bore down on me.
Everything was too vivid, too intrusive, too grotesquely alive.
In the dungeon, I had been dead but content—cocooned in silence and shadow.
Now, I was thrust into life, and it felt like dying all over again.
Even the air was a betrayal.
It rushed into my lungs, cool and sharp, inflating me in ways I had never known.
In the dungeon, the air had been thick, stagnant—a sluggish thing that stopped at the chest, weighted by stone.
But this—this was light, playful, darting down to my stomach like a taunt.
And then, as if the world had conspired in a singular, unrelenting assault—
Light, sound, scent, and space—
All collided, suffocating me.
My body rebelled.
I doubled over, retching violently onto the ground, as if expelling the very essence of this alien reality.
I didn't belong here.
This world of brightness, of movement and sound, was not mine.
I was made for the damp.
The dark.
The stillness of stone.
In the dungeon, I had been alive.
Here, in the open air, under the vast sky, I was dead.
While I fought for breath, her voice cut through the tension—quiet, but commanding.
"Stop," she said. The word landed like a blade. "He needs a moment."
I was still hunched over, trembling, my body purging itself of air and light.
She knelt beside me, her hands steady as she brushed the hair from my forehead.
When the convulsions subsided, she pulled a scrap of cloth from her sleeve and wiped my face with brisk, careful movements.
"There," she murmured, more to herself than to me. "All better now."
Her hand tightened around mine as she stood.
"We'll go," she said, firmer now. "But no more shoving. He will walk himself."
The guards exchanged glances. One made a scoffing noise—but they stepped aside.
She gave my hand a squeeze, a silent command to stand tall.
Together, we moved forward once more.
Ahead of us stood the wooden cage.
I recognized it immediately—the same crude contraption that had carried us from home to the dungeon.
Its splintered edges, its rusted hinges—etched into memory as much as the dungeon itself.
Now, bathed in daylight, it seemed more sinister.
Its purpose unchanged.
Only the destination unknown.
Where would it take us this time?
The ride was interminable.
Each jarring bump and sway of the cart a cruel reminder of powerlessness.
The wheels groaned against the earth.
Wood creaked.
Metal scraped.
The world moved around me, but I refused to move with it.
She sat beside me, gaze fixed ahead, her face unreadable.
I kept my eyes shut.
I would not let in the brightness, the motion, the unbearable vitality of the world outside the cage.
The sunlight that had assaulted me now pressed against my eyelids—a mocking, unrelenting presence I could not shut out.
I loathed the sensation.
This surrender.
This helplessness.
Every jolt of the cart, every turn, every foreign sound reminded me:
I was no longer master of my world.
I was cargo.
A passenger dragged through a life I had not chosen.
So I clung to the only constant: her hand in mine.
That grip—firm, unwavering—was my anchor in the chaos.
The world could tilt, churn, and shatter.
But that touch remained.
It was the last bastion against an invasion of light, movement, and life that I had never wanted to face.
—————————
We arrived at last, the cart grinding to a halt amidst the swirling dust.
Before I could register the shift, they threw us onto the sand with all the grace of discarding trash.
The sun—relentless, punishing—burned the tops of our heads, its heat turning the air into a shimmering haze.
I stumbled forward, the coarse grains biting into my knees.
A rough shove pressed me further down, the guard's hand a wordless command.
Behind me, the unmistakable pressure of a blade whispered its presence—cold, silent, absolute.
My mother knelt beside me, composed in defiance.
Her back was straight, her chin unbowed.
But her hands—clasped tightly in her lap—betrayed a tremor.
One flicker. One fracture in the mask.
The crimson tent loomed ahead, casting a sharp-edged shadow over the blinding sand.
Through its open entrance, I saw men seated inside, their gestures sharp, their voices blurred by distance.
The exchange was inaudible, but the weight of it pressed against us all the same.
On the right, a man sat behind a low table, perfectly still.
Too still.
There was an intensity in his stillness—
A presence that pulled focus.
He did not move, did not even twitch, as the others argued around him.
Something in him struck a chord.
Familiar, but without memory to anchor it.
Father.
The word surfaced unbidden.
Could it be him?
I didn't ask.
I didn't look to my mother.
Even I, a child, knew—this was not the moment for questions.
My mother was no longer the quiet woman who cradled me in the dark.
She knelt tall, her spine unbending, gaze fixed on the tent like she could will it to open.
An unfamiliar energy radiated from her—
Anxious, yes, but tinged with something stranger.
Hope.
As though a door long sealed had cracked, letting in the faintest sliver of light.
Then they moved.
The men on the left stood—sharp, deliberate.
One stepped forward, pointing toward us.
His voice sliced the air, harsh and jagged.
The still man turned his head—
Slowly, reluctantly—until his gaze found us.
And then closed his eyes.
Not out of fatigue.
But rejection.
As though to see us would be to admit something intolerable.
He shut us out—entirely and deliberately.
And then—
It came.
The cold kiss of steel grazed my neck, sending a shiver that defied the desert's heat.
The blade was not a warning—
It was a promise.
I froze.
The sand scorched my palms.
My mother moved instantly, shielding me with her body, her arms a fragile fortress of flesh and instinct.
Her face turned to mine.
Her eyes locked onto mine—wide, glittering, defiant.
Tears caught the light like fractured stars.
The sun painted her cheeks with a delicate flush, glowing against her near-translucent skin.
It was not fear.
It was something else.
A calm acceptance.
A silent goodbye.
She smiled.
Not the soft smile of our nights in the dungeon.
Not the warmth that had shielded me from nightmares.
This smile was final.
Weighty.
A brittle shield held aloft in the face of the inevitable.
She smiled for me.
Not herself.
And then—
Silence.
Not the silence I had loved.
Not the hush of stone and stillness.
This was silence at the edge of chaos—when the world stops breathing.
I stared at her, memorizing everything:
The line of her jaw, the tremble in her lips, the light clinging to her lashes.
If this was to be the end, I would carry that image into whatever lay beyond.
I didn't move.
I didn't breathe.
We were balanced on the knife's edge of everything.
And I knew—
One flick of that blade, and it would all vanish.
But then—
It didn't happen.
The blade, cold and unyielding at my neck, hesitated.
The tension—taut as a drawn bowstring—didn't snap.
It unraveled.
Slowly.
Deliberately.
Hands seized me—rough, urgent.
I was yanked to my feet.
My mother too.
We were shoved with the same indifference as before—tools, not people.
The guards moved like clockwork, efficient and unmoved, herding us backwards like livestock returned to the pen.
I stumbled.
My knees buckled.
The moment—still pressing down like stone—made my legs tremble.
Her grip on my hand wasn't comforting.
It was desperate.
Like if she held tight enough, the world might hold still.
The guard's hand bore down on my shoulder, forcing me forward.
But I turned.
And there he was.
Just at the edge of my vision—my supposed father.
His posture was composed.
His body angled toward us.
As if—perhaps—he might acknowledge our presence.
But his eyes…
They were shut.
Tightly.
Deliberately.
Not out of weariness.
But choice.
It wasn't avoidance.
It was erasure.
To open his eyes would mean seeing us.
To see us was to confront what he'd done.
And he wasn't built for that.
So he chose blindness.
Comfort.
Cowardice.
He would not meet my gaze.
I wanted to scream.
To slice through the silence he wrapped around himself like armor.
To force him to look.
But I didn't.
I didn't need to.
My silence was sharper.
Coward.
The word scorched hotter than the sun above us.
Twice he had chosen absence over presence.
Twice he had turned his face from what was his.
I might have shouted.
I might have begged.
But why waste breath on a man who no longer existed?
The fury boiled inside me—thick, black, burning.
It filled my chest, clawed at my throat, settled like a curse in my bones.
The guard shoved me forward again.
I stumbled, caught myself.
And turned back.
One last look.
And just like that—
He was gone.
Wiped clean.
Erased from the world I would come to build.