You snap awake with a sharp inhalation through your nose, and resist the urge to lash out. Instead, you bend your ears to listen. Your cellmate on the bottom bunk is still deeply asleep, as it should be; the dance you danced with its kidneys will take some time to sleep off, and leave no marks of your handiwork besides. One of the Guards is walking past, at the leisurely pace of what must be a night patrol. It does not use a light. It does not need light. Or, rather, a Guard does not need light for anyone but you, not that they seem to have realized this as a whole. You are not certain why you have certain...strange privileges, here Inside, but they are precious and to be guarded at all costs.
When the patrol passes, you gently get down from your bunk, landing on tip-toes so your heavy boots don't make noise. Another little privilege. Not even the Warden seems to understand that you're wearing them. You don't know where they came from, except that they are from Outside, and therefore important. You glance at your pillow; the Wolf will be concealed in its case, the little plush creature that speaks to you and directs you and knows what to do and to whom, most of the time, but it will also be asleep. Let it rest.
You wash your face in front of a mirror that will not bear your reflection and go to the bars of your cell to gaze out at Durance-on-Bay, where you are Inside.
It is huge, Inside. It is also small, Inside. This must be understood on a level other than the logical or you'll end up like the others, who leaked blood from their noses and eyes until there was no more blood left to leak, and they died. Imagine it like...a shadow puppet. One hand making the puppet is a vast panopticon, an impossible mirrored tower in the midst of stacks and stacks and stacks of cell blocks, none able to escape the eyes of the observers in the towers, barred in glass-and-steel. Some, most even, contain living prisoners, hundreds of them, and you are not certain how the prison feeds them all. The kitchen always has food, like in a dream. Maybe it doesn't come from anywhere. Maybe it's just the dream of a kitchen.
But there is another hand that makes up this shadow-puppet place. That hand is a claustrophobic and more physical building, defined by narrow hallways that would, a long time ago, have been secured by wall-mounted cannon. It has a comprehensible layout, gates and doors and stairs and fire extinguishers, the prisoners have to sweep its floors and cook its food and labor in its facilities.
That hand of Durance-on-Bay is cracking, and creaking. Never in good repair,
something has been exacerbating the damage to the walls, the crumbling of the floors. It's interesting, though. Whenever the Warden needs to give a prisoner to its lesser pigs, a "cooperative inmate", the Warden is
only in the physical prison. But when the Warden wants to make an example, it appears in both. It often makes an example of those who don't sufficiently rip out and scour the jagged glass that grows from the cracks in the walls and eats away at the edges of the iron bars. The glass scares the Warden.
Lights on, soon. Another day Inside.
Welcome to Durance-on-Bay
Your prisoner number is: 17060
Convictions: Second-degree homicide, theft, arson, aggravated assault, assault with deadly weapon, battery, unlicensed oneiromancy
Time remaining in sentence: 230 years
Eligible for parole?: No
Warden's Note: Treat as armed and dangerous at all times
Prisoner 17060, you are in possession of TWO pieces of contraband in addition to the Wolf that speaks to you in your own voice
[ ] A "knife"
[ ] A healthy stash of cigarettes
[ ] A visitor's map of the physical prison
[ ] A blank key from the workshop
[ ] Some of that jagged glass, ground into powder and hidden in your mattress
Prisoner 17060, what is your plan for the day?
[ ] Make an example of a fellow inmate
- The Wolf doesn't like it, but the Wolf doesn't understand what it's like to be Inside
[ ] Meet with the Chaplain
- It's not a pig, somehow. You need to figure out why.
[ ] Figure out what happens to prisoners that make parole
- The Wolf doesn't trust that they actually go free. You don't either.
Begin Part 3: The Law of the Long Arm
"Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric moved:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I shall endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here."
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
You have 230 years left in your sentence, Prisoner 17060
