1. Imprisonment

James came to with a massive headache. Instinctively, his first reaction was to grab his head to ease the pain. Or at least attempt to as he found his hands bound behind him in what felt like very thick handcuffs. His eyes took longer to adjust to the darkness. He shivered as the rest of his senses returned to him. The smell of piss again, mixed with a sense of dampness in the air almost made him retch. He worried he'd never get the smell of piss out of his nose at this rate.

He seemed to be in a stone cellar of some sort. Cold stone floors and what he imagined were equally cold stone walls. A small amount of light was coming from what he imagined was a corridor but it was hard to make anything out. He wriggled and twitched in an attempt to get his hands in front of him to lessen the pain in his shoulders. For some odd reason, his hands were bound with the palm of his hands facing outwards. This made the task of moving his hands in front of him doubly difficult. Try as he might, he could not twist his hands in the cuffs to re-orient them to allow him the mobility to ease his pain. The cuffs were simply too tight along his wrists to allow any flexibility.

"The more you struggle, the tighter they become", a female voice called out to him from the darkness.

He glanced in the direction the voice came from. A dark corner of the room he had dismissed out of band. He could make out the rough shape of a person sitting on the floor.

"Who are you?! Where are we?" he fought to keep the panic from his voice.

"We are in the King's guard holding cells awaiting trial. You must have done something fucked up to get thrown here. Usually the guards are easily bought off with a few silver. And a magic dampening bracelet to boot? What's your blessing and focus?"

James noticed she ignored his question about her identity but put that aside to focus on the other questions that he was bubbling with.

"So we get a trial? I've done nothing wrong! One moment I was at work on my computer and the next I'm in a strange place. Hell, I'm still in a strange place with no idea what the fuck is going on!" He said in a frustrated manner.

"Clearly not nothing or you wouldn't be here. The trial is just a formality anyways, less to decide whether you're guilty and more so to decide on your punishment. The guard loses credibility if they arrest someone who isn't guilty. So they make sure that doesn't happen. You still haven't told me your blessing. You're already caught, no point in hiding it anymore." She mentioned inching closer to me.

James noticed that she too was bound in a similar manner to me. Her brunette hair was matted and clunky and there was elements of dirt and grime on her face. Underneath were hints of sharp features and piercing black eyes.

"I don't know what that means."

"The mage mark on your hand you were born with! Looks like they hit you really hard on the head." She exclaimed.

"I wasn't really born with any 'mark' but if you're talking about the diamond tattoo I seem to have acquired, I don't really know what it means." James explained exasperated.

"Ugh! This is going to be harder than I thought.", the girl tried speaking slowly as if he was simply not understanding her words. "When. you. do. magic, what. color. is. it?"

James' mind was going a thousand miles a minute trying to understand. He was in some strange place, and while he'd heard the words "mage" and "magic", it hadn't really registered quite in a way that screamed "magic was real".

"Magic...is real?" James ventured.

He imagined rather than saw the look of incredulity on her face. She did however drag herself back to the dark corner.

'This must be a dream. More a nightmare than anything.' James thought. The consequences of it being real were too far reaching to think of. He fought the rising anxiety in his chest and attempting to calm himself down with deep breaths. 'Real or no, I have to find a way to free myself from this predicament and to do that I need to know what the hell is going on.'

"Ok look, let's start over. I have no clue how I ended up here. I might be from a different world and I've never seen magic before in my life. My name is James. Who are you? How did you end up here?" James asked. She was his best chance of finding out more information about his situation.

"You really don't know? Very well. My name is Ava. I was born with the death mark. That's as good as a death sentence in the Selen kingdom. Any dark magic, the only kind possible with the death mark, is punishable by death. It's a terrible life but I accepted it. I was careful and never cast anything in the presence of others." Ava explained. "Fate had something different in store for me though. I was cornered at night in an alley by a group of thugs. Careless of me but nothing I can do now. I never even harmed anyone. A simple dark cover spell that allowed me to escape. And now I await my execution." She finished in a mournful tone.

"That's ridiculous! We have to get out of here." The reality of his own situation was starting to sink in to James. He struggled again against the cuffs on his hands, which tightened enough to cause him to yelp again.

"Calm down." Ava told him. "These bracelets are powered by magic. No amount of physical force will get rid of them. They also dampen magic, thereby preventing us from casting any spells."

"We can't wait around for them to come and ex..execute us!" James exclaimed.

"They probably won't execute you. As addled as your brain is, you're still mage blessed and not by death magic. You'll probably be sent to the dungeons instead. What crime did they charge you with?" Ava inquired.

"Breaking the King's sword I think. Whatever that means. Not that I had anything to do with that." James clarified, remembering the diamond explosion that resulted in said breakage.

Ava winced. "On second thought, they might execute you too."

James slowly shuffled to his feet and attempted to explore his surroundings. He had to find a way out of here. He made his way towards the faint light from the hallway.

Thock

"Fuck!". He had hit his head on a vertical metal bar and fallen backwards. His face scrunched up at the smell of vomit emanating from the floor.

"Why hadn't I thought of simply walking out of here?" Ava quipped from behind him.

"How can you be so calm?!" James exclaimed.

"I have a plan. Now sit down and listen." She whispered gestured to a place near her. "The bracelets do not have infinite magic. In fact, these cheap things the guards use need to be recharged every day. The mage responsible is not strong enough to do it from a distance so he needed to get inside the cell.", she continued after he had sat down close enough.

James scrunched up his face at a weird smell coming from her. Like the type of smell that comes from squishing a cockroach. He chose not to mention it so as not to upset her.

"I've been preparing for this moment for a few days." She lifted her leg but it was too dark for him to see what was underneath it. "They're dead insects. Death energy lingers in their body for a time after they die. With this, I think I can manifest enough energy to break the bracelets at their weakest time."

"That's great! How do we get out of here after that?" James inquired, hope of escape pushing away the despair in his mind.

"I had hoped for another, ...capable, mage blessed to be honest. Someone who could help after. Breaking both our bracelets will mostly exhaust my reserves, even with the dead bugs. We have to take down the mage when he enters the cell. After that, we'll simply have to fight our way out and hope that the element of surprise is enough to see us out.", Ava explained the plan.

James nodded in agreement. There were a lot of things that could go wrong, the least of which was that neither of them had any idea which way was to the exit. But it was something. His headache, exacerbated by the bump against the cell bars came back with a vengeance.

"I think I need to lie down." He told her.

"Very well. I will wake you at dawn. That is when the mage will come, and we wil have our chance."

James scuttled a bit farther from her, and lay down on the hard stone floor. He hoped this was a dream and the next minute he would wake up in his apartment in San Francisco instead of a medieval dungeon. A tiny part of his brain however, was excited about the possibility of seeing real life magic.