The Arkanist

The Garden of Bones

A bar of white light trickled through the wrought-iron gates of the prison cell. All else was black as pitch, cool and musty with the stench of decay lingering in the air. They had been in the cell for more than day they knew, and the stench had grown ever more putrid and fetor each hour. They had been thrown in a deep cell, far under the walls of the city, where the stonewalls oozed with slim and crawled with insects of the desert.

         Their hands were bound with biting iron shackles, the linking rings heavy and thick. They hardly bothered to move, for the sound would be tormenting—the scraping of rusted iron across stone. It burned their ears until it felt as if they were bleeding. Blood found its way into the cell all to often, whether dried at their wrists or seeping from their noses or crusty at their blackened knees. The smell stayed in the cell, heavy and oppressive like the darkness.

         Down in the cells, propped up with his beaten back against the rough stonewall, Visir felt another jab of pain in his chest, stronger and fiercer. The darkness had awoken it. Near his heart, there was a piercing stab, as if there was a dagger in his chest. The pain pulsed until it lanced across his body, immobilizing him. Each time he tried to breathe, the pain lanced like lightning and forced him back into a hunch, his back seizing up at the spine.

         The pain was only part of the pain in the deep and dark cell. Visions swam in the shadows, curling like pale mist, almost ghostly. They whispered in his ears in hisses and scrapes. Some wrapped around his frail body like a blanket of pallid mist, shimmering as if wrought of diamonds. The blanket darkened in the heart, where a deep black hole opened in size, consuming Visir alive, plunging him into a world of shadow and death, where he stood alone atop a withered and emaciated hill, drooping with sorrow.

         The hill was clad in a fine film of the grey mist and is drifted along the black earth, visions of the dead hanging in the eerie sky like stars. Their faint figures black with grief and mourning. The desolation expanded vast and wicked to Visir’s dark eyes, the dead lowering in their arms carelessly down towards him. The misty hands flaunted down and reached out for him, trying to snag him. They tried to grab, to rip him from his desolation, to bring him to his death.

         The hands became overwhelming, and Visir could not fight them any longer, the arms enveloping his body in a flash of white and black.  He jolted out of his nightmare as a spear of light pierced his eye, seeping in from the bars of iron. There was a loud moan of steel above and another screech closer to them. The gates were opening; they were being released. Amidst Visir’s distorted visions, there was a flash of shivering red light burning through the thick blackness. It sparked in a loud crack and released tiny rubies into the heavy air, the glints drifting away. There was a face, glowing in the flickering red light, it dark complexion tinted a silvery red. They were coming to bring them out. But why?

         The sun devoured him as he hung from a sandstone pillar, the harsh rope biting his arms. Visir had to rest on his decrepit knees just to relieve some of the pain, for most of it blazed in his upper arms, which held him up and kept him from falling on his face. His head hung low, long oily strands of black hair glistened with sweat and beads of brown slipped off the tendrils and sprinkled on the ground. Visir stared at the accumulating black dots of smeared sweat, thin lines streaking from their hearts like arms.

         Arstain was shackled in the same fashion beside him, on the next pillar over. They were outside, he knew that much from the sun. But where? Visir did not know, but Arstain did. He had been here, long ago, upon maybe his third visit passed the Divide. He had come as an onlooker, a witness to the ghastly show. Now, he would be the entertainment.