Your body is an atlas of scars.
Pale ridges of knotted tissue and raised up ropes of stitched together skin. Shiny knicks and smaller, glossy marks on your forearms and shins. Strands of keloid criss-crossing your chest and webbing their way across your back; clustering thickly around your wrists, around your ankles where the metal bit deep. An arc over your right cheekbone where faintly tanned flesh split; something to see every time you catch a glimpse of your own reflection, every time you see your face mirrored back in standing water or a scrap of polished metal. You can feel them catching and tugging against you when you move, a latent, lingering stiffness that clings to the surface. And there's so many, you have so many, that you can't even begin to remember where they're all from. Which floggings, which beatings, who held the whip and why. Which ones they gave to you and which ones you gave to yourself, worrying away in the night with soft nails because you knew -you knew- that if you ever drew steel you wouldn't be able to stop. That you'd slit yourself open and die there in the dirt, the ghost of a smile curving up the corners of your mouth. Finally at peace.
...They really did a number on you, didn't they?
It's not your fault, don't blame yourself. You were broken before you were even born. You've never had a chance to be anything but what you are and you're so far gone that you wouldn't know how. You ate the cage, secreted it away in your stomach and now it lives within you: you carry your prison with you always and all the guards need to do is raise their hand to make you flinch back from the bars. Maybe that's why you can only think of freedom as an abstract, a series of associations. Containers for something formless, something invisible and unknown.
Freedom is sleep.
Freedom is death.
Freedom is the sea.
Freedom is the empty City, drowned by the waves, swallowed up by the silence. Freedom is the empty jail, locks long-broken and manacle chains corroded into so much rust. Freedom is a world without soldiers or slaves, without hunger or want or pain or fear. A world where you won't have to hurt and in the end, at the heart of everything, there's just that simple, almost childlike desire: to not have to hurt anymore. To not have to wake up day after day, this shattered thing of crushed-in ribs and broken bones wearing the face of a helot. Imagining that it's human.
Freedom is an unwinding, peeling away the blood-stained bandages and letting the shattered thing finally fall apart.
The dream takes you in gentle hands. It's a familiar one, a kind of comfort for one who can carry nearly nothing with him. Who owns precious little and has so few things to call his own. But no matter what you will have this, and even if your higher soul forgets for months and years your animal self, your feral guts, will remember. Will clasp it close and never let it go.
You hang suspended over the abyss; toes pointed down and arms outstretched. You're floating, a million miles from anywhere and anything; an eternity of water extending in every direction. Fathoms beneath your feet, open ocean on every side. A soft, sapphire glow, a cerulean haze, that darkens by degrees, bleeding into a perfect blackness far, far below. The heat is gone now, the sun long-vanished and it's just Luna, just moon and her throne, that shines. Caressing the feathery mess of your hair, the long licks and stray spikes that sway in the current, strand separating from strand. Your lungs are full of mercury.
It starts on the outside and works its way in. Dried sweat and caked on filth unspooling in long, gauzy ribbons of grey. The grease and oil in your hair washing free, the fabric of your clothes lightening as clouds of dirt billow out. Then the jacket itself, the pants and tunic, unlacing; threads unweaving themselves and squirming away like so many startled worms. A textile clot that dissolves into long skeins of thread that dissolves into nothing. Leaving you naked, leaving you nude; the marks that mar your evaporating, dissolving in the brine like so much painted on dye. As if it was all just a trick of brushes and paints and a bit of sculpting clay. Like it was never really true at all.
The outer layers of your skin next: sheets of half-translucent tissue, white as fine muslin, curling away in ribbons. Hair gone like a dandelion puff in a gust of wind. The red meat beneath the surface, the glossy tendons and milky-clear cartilage detaching and slithering into the deep. Purple-grey viscera slipping from beneath bleak ribs and muddy brown eyes floating free, rootlike nerves trailing. Everything sloughing off, the burdens falling one by one until you're just a skeleton. Just so many polished ivory bones, acid-etched with things unsaid, things you could never say, will never say. Your head tipped back, flayed jaws gleaming, tongue melting into so much scarlet mist. And then the salt water chews that up too, erodes it into so much fine-grained dust, snow-white grit carried away on tidal forces. The line of destruction sweeping up over your sockets and you have no lids left but you feel like you close them anyway. It's over. You can stop now. You can rest now.
Freedom is an ending.
You jerk awake with a strangled gasp, gagging, panting as you hunch over. Shoulders hitching, rising and falling; eyes scrunched shut a second later as you choke down a low, miserable moan. As you feel every muscle anchored to your spine obligingly twist itself into a knot of crimson cords at the sudden motion, a snarl of sinew that spans your entire back. Pulling every extremity in, crushing you in a giant's hand. You hiss a curse, something about Hesiesh's balls, as you try not to audibly whimper, not to outright sob. This is your fault, you should have tried to stretch yourself out at least a little, you shouldn't have just laid right down. Too late to do anything now but ride it out.
Tears prickle your eyes, hot and harsh. You try to ignore the way your lips slowly peel back from your teeth despite yourself. The corners of your mouth stinging, cracking as the small cuts re-open, the rictus snarl still just a drop in the bucket compared to the nightmare-cramp currently working its way through your body. The giant's fingers squeezing.
"(Fuckgodsshitfuckowowow)."
And then, bit by bit, it ebbs. It fades. It dwindles down to something manageable and you almost retch as you draw in weak, shuddery breaths. Head between your knees and hands resting in the dirt; every ounce of focus you have bent on not vomiting up the few mouthfuls of sour water and bile that's all you really have left in your stomach.
The early morning air is cool and damp; thick tendrils of mist wreathing the village, swaddling the camp just beyond. Lanterns glowing in the murk like miniature stars, supply wagons rising up, their shadows hulking-huge in the fog. In a few hours the sun will rise and burn it all away, already the east horizon is brightening into bruised shades; the rich blues and deep purples herald his approach. But for now the square might as well be alien terrain, foreign and strange; all but carpeted in bodies. The "battle standards" a stain on the leaden grey, just visible now and then through the swirling, low-hanging clouds.
Push a shaky hand through your hair, your eyes flicking to the side. Jason's gone; left at some point before you woke up. You just stare dully, worry warring with indifference, with apathy and that "well what did you expect" feeling that you can't quite name but know oh so intimately. And then you hear the sound of a woman politely clearing her throat and you realize that he might not be here but that doesn't mean you're alone.
Slowly, slowly, ignoring the way your neck protests, you turn and look at the woman standing not five paces to your left. Ducking your head as you noisily swallow, gaze darting up and away and back again.
She's old. Her skin the color and texture of worn leather, her hair the color of iron ore. It's hard to tell with you on the ground and her above but you think you'd stand taller than her if you straightened up (like you could) and set back your shoulders (like you would) and that alone is impressive. She…smiles at you and you see that her mouth is filled with teeth like tempered steel. Metal glimmering in the half-light; matched at the throat, the wrists, to mineral veins. She's all earth and stone you realize; the back of her hands split and fractured, flesh into fissures like a cracked cliffside but solid for all that; implaccable and unyielding for all that. And it's hard to miss the way her knuckles are flattened like a brawler's.
She wears Listener's garb that has been- not mutilated, no but muted. Made into something that can withstand long travel on the road. A white shawl knotted over one shoulder, a cloak the color of sand dunes, hood drawn up beneath a broad brimmed hat. A cassock of a kind from throat to ankle, belted at the waist, and here is the sole nod to station. The buttons are polished stone.
The priestess leans on her walking stick and unslings a waterskin, offering it to you wordlessly. You reach up with a trembling hand, half-cowering back already. Expecting it to be pulled away as you take it, expecting the strike from the stick, Listeners are usually kinder than the soldiers but the difference is a matter of apathy and antipathy. They don't overtly disdain you. Rare is the one who will deign to touch you.
The skin settles in your hand, she watches as you hesitantly raise it to your lips.
Cold, crisp water washes down your parched throat and the noise you make is barely human. You down it in great greedy gulps, throat bobbing, belly aching before you physically tear yourself away and hand it back, significantly lighter than before. You drank more than you meant to, more than you should have. You'd be on your knees right now, begging forgiveness if you could wrench your body into the right pose, if everything wasn't so heavy, so stiff.
"I'm- I'm sorry Sister," you start, "I didn't mean to-"
A hand that could snap your collarbone like a twig settles on your shoulder.
The woman shrugs, replies in a faintly accented tongue. Tinged with something Northern, from the lands across the Yanaze, "It is only water my brother, you are thirsty and I am not."
Everything in your brain grinds to a halt.
"I-" you start again and then stop, voice hoarse because you have nowhere to go with the thought, "...Don't understand" you finish lamely.
"My name is Listener Karatzas," she says, "the armies here put out the call for more hands to attend the flock and see to the helots. And the fighting men and women I suppose. I came to do the Dragon's work."
"Oh, revered Sister I am sorry for wasting your-"
"Do not apologize."
"So-" you snap your jaws shut hard enough you can feel the click of enamel on enamel. She continues, utterly unconcerned, untroubled, and a piece of you wonders if this is still part of the dream. Something strung together by your half awake mind out disparate thoughts and scattered impressions.
"I am here to minister to the sick, to the deprived," she says gently, "and I see here that there is much deprivation. Is that not so?"
You nod after a second; after you realize that she's waiting on you to respond, that this is a conversation instead of- what? A trick? A trap? There are no guards here, this deep into the makeshift pen. There's nobody who's paying attention, nobody who cares. Just you and she. Her hand drifts up, fingertips on your jaw, tipping your head back so that you'll look at her, properly look at her. The Listener's thumb gently touched to the scar under your eye.
"Ah, look at you. They've treated you abominably haven't they?" She asks, not unkindly. You're shaking, something fundamental inside you cracking under the- the pressure? The release? As you nod again. "All of you, so much like this. And there's so many of you here. What were they thinking, piling you all in like this? But I suppose that's the way of Southern soldiers, they cannot imagine themselves free unless they see men in bondage, and then what do they do? Sell themselves to extortionists and gilded clerics and call it liberty. Lies built on lies, how far we've all fallen from grace."
You're weeping now, you think. You can't tell, but your cheeks are wet and your eyes ache and something's dripping from your nose. Lift the back of your hand to your face and shakily drag it across your lips, Listener Karatzas seems as if she couldn't care less.
"They refuse to let us hold a single service for the slaves, they insist on these shifts. Hmph, well I think that fair is as fair does and that I, myself, will hold a proper reading tonight for those who would attend. And I think I would like it if a boy as brave as yourself would attend."
"(...Aren't you afraid?)" you mumble after a moment, staring up at her as the heavens lighten, the fog thins around you, "(That I'll report you for-)" for the things she said. For her kindness. For the way she's speaking to you, treating you all wrong, like no one should.
"Will you?" She asks mildly.
A pause, you slowly shake your head and she pats your cheek. "Then what have I to fear? Tonight, boy, at the storehouse near the Northern wall. The army seized all the grain, moved it to their camp and it's no church to be sure but I find it suits me just fine. Come if you will, there's no shame if you do not."
And then she just...walks off. She just leaves. And you watch her as she goes, as she vanishes into the fogbank; your own hand creeping up to where she touched you, your pain almost entirely forgotten. You're still sitting like that when Jason walks out of the gloom a few minutes later, a pair of bowls in his hands. Steam shimmering over the surface; rice porridge and a few scraps of meat. He sees you're awake and his footsteps slow. That almost-smile fading, replaced by a grimace. He holds out one for you, averting his eyes as you take it. Sitting down beside you with his own.
"I'm sorry, heh, I must have worried you," he says at last. "They started doling out rations early and I didn't want you to go hungry. And I didn't want to wake you because, to be honest, you looked like dogshit. You probably thought I just left huh?"
"(It's fine)," you reply. You don't tear into the meal, not at first, just sit with it cradled on your lap. Enjoying the faint heat that seeps through.
He makes an ambiguous sound around a mouthful of broth, equal parts "I don't believe you" and "I don't want to argue and make it worse". You take it and you're grateful for it and you don't hold it against him, you really don't, you're just...processing a lot, right now, turning the meeting with the woman over in your mind. Trying to place that accent in her head, a quiet exhale escaping as it finally clicks, as you realize where you've heard that cadence before:
On the tongue of a man from Messathalene.
You have some time to talk before the morning shift starts and Jason is the only one you have who you can talk to, the only one who you can confide in, who you can really trust. If only because you're probably dead if you don't. But he is kind and it's been more than a week and he hasn't tried to hurt you. And he does seem to care for you.
Try to reach out to him. Be honest, confess something sincere.
[ ] Tell him you're afraid of what the army'll do if they win or, worse, if it seems like they might lose. There's so many helots here and the troops are taking all the food. You don't know how you'll make it through if they decide to just...deal with you all here.
[ ] Tell him you're sorry you thought ill of him, he's been good to you and you have precious few friends as it is. That you- that you care about him too. Even if he could do better than you. Even if you might drag him down, get him killed. Even if you're barely human.
[ ] Tell him you're almost looking forward to Xauma's arrival in a perverse kind of way. They're monsters sure, but let's be honest: being eaten alive would almost be a relief in and of itself, wouldn't it? Maybe they'll tear off your head, at least it'll be fast.
[ ] Tell him how you used to dream of being different, of being something other than what you are. There are no Dragonblooded among the helots but as a child everyone hopes don't they? That maybe it'll be true for them. Maybe it'll be true for you.
