The events of that first day repeated themselves. The presence of the brutish man who came to feed them tasteless slop began to bring them solace in its routine and indeed was the only marker for when a new day had begun. That first day had been the only time they had seen even a glimpse of the miners. After that, they had always been alone, with only the brutish man who came to feed and water them as well as change their waste bucket.

The second day, after their skinny-boyish collogue had been returned to the earth at the hands of the brutish man, the brutish man had appeared bearing a sullen and gloomy expression. His head, arms, and legs all bore red-stained bandages that seeped messily as he worked. He had grimaced as he had worked. Over the days the bandages had slowly left, replaced with a new set of scars, which fanned out across his limb and even his face in ugly red lines. Still, his expression never softened, and his movements became gentler and more careful. Carlos suspected this was out of fear. It was clear that whoever was directing this brutish man had not taken kindly to the death of the prisoner.

The moments in between were spent sleeping or else waiting. In the first few days, none of the prisoners spoke to each other. Even the older man, the one who had called himself Elandris and had begged to be heard, had retreated into silence. The impact of the violence had left each of the men in a state of stupor, their movements devolving into a sort of clockwork, instinct-driven survival. They moved about to eat, or else to relieve their bowels into the waste bucket.

Otherwise, they slept or stared into the abyss of the dimly lit rock face of their cave prison. Each had retreated into the recesses of their own minds. There they found sanctuary against the horrors of their reality in the comforts of past memory. These dreams and memories intertwined, with the only semblance of life and humanity punctuating through the silence in mumbles or intermittent screams during their periods of sleep.

Only Carlos seemed immune. Carlos was still driven by a small ember of hope, a meaning for survival that transcended the boundaries of his prison. It was a deep-set unquenchable fire that laid hidden and buried within that smoldering ember. An ember that persisted against the cruel and unbridled gale of hopelessness, boredom, and captivity that did its best to try and smother and fully extinguish what remaining humanity Carlos had left.

Carlos too existed in a state of persistent remembering. The walls of his prison and the insufferable silence of his companions had driven him to the brink of madness. In the beginning days, he had tried to break through their shells. He recognized their symptoms; the emptiness in their eyes that seemed to no longer work as intended, acting now as mirrors of their internal world that sheltered them from the trauma and responsibility of their own survival.

In those early days he had shouted at them, physically shook them as hard as he could, but they only seemed to cling tighter to their shared blanket and stare or sleep. When he had shaken them they either shrugged him off or else let themselves be shaken, the jolt of human touch softening their expressions and sparking a glimmer of sentience before the waves of sweet pacifying nostalgia once again drowned them back into their comatose like stupor.

He had at first spoken to them, he needed to be heard, to exist, and ultimately to not be alone. He told them stories of the monsters of the wilds. Stories of the great scorpions of the Khalmuki who laid sand traps, their poison-tipped tails waving harmoniously in the wind like the stalks of a desert palm, the only indication of their terrible nests. These tails had held great bulbous date-like fruits. The scent of which enticed men with their sweet scents until the beasts snatched them with wickedly curved and barbed claws, only to pull them down beneath the shining golden sands of the Khalmuki. Their poison-tipped stingers slipping into the spines of their victims who would be paralyzed with the neurotoxin only to be slowly devoured bit by bit within the Scorpions lair.

He spoke to them about the beast-men of his homeland. Beasts that lived within the filthy bogs and preyed on the innocent villages of the Marshlands of the Wyrwood. They were beasts like men who lived in wolf-like packs and merely pantomimed men, building cheap hovels out of marsh grass and mud. These beast-men lived off the flesh of men, hunting them with ravenous ferocity. Some beast-men even knew how to mimic the look of men and women, an ability that allowed them to leverage their countenance in order to ensnare their victims. He told them these stories and more, yet nothing he said was enough to break through the spell of despair that gripped them in perpetual comatose inducing dreams.

As time became less and less discernable, Carlos found himself succumbing to the maddening effects of isolation. And so, his reality soon was replaced with memories. Memories of his youth and the events that led up to his unfortunate imprisonment.

Even more than the flood of vivid memories that replaced his conscious mind, blending and blurring the line between reality and dream, was the rage brewing inside him.

The rage rose and fell like the tides of the sea, sometimes reaching a boiling point that forced him into action, channeling through his muscles and into intense moments of exercise which mimicked the training he had received in his days as an enlisted man. He used the weight of the archaic rusted chains, wrapping them around himself as he pushed his body to the limits of exhaustion. Each bout of exercise burned white-hot with the anger, keeping it from consuming him into self-destructiveness. Every time his body failed, the tide ebbed, giving way to anguish and ultimately sleep which was abated by the dreams of his past life.

As Carlos slipped ever deeper in this nostalgic ever-dream, the events of his mission and that thing which drove him to live played out within his mind. In the meanwhile, his companions continued to wallow in their despair, the Kthollite and the grizzled gladiator of Dalm softening the outline of their muscles by their perpetual slumber and inaction.

So, Carlos dreamed of the home as he relived the events that had led to this fate.

Carlos was a child again. His eyes were wide with surprise as he held his first sword in his tiny undeveloped hands. His palms were slick with excitement. It seemed so large, long, and heavy in his untrained arms. The large black-bearded man with piercing blue eyes and copper-toned skin looked down at him with a stern stoic expression. He seemed as tall as a mountain to young Carlos, a hulking behemoth of rippling muscles poorly hidden beneath the flowing royal-purple hued garments of silk that shimmered around him. Despite the hardness of the face, Carlos felt safe looking at it. The eyes of the mountain betrayed a softness when it looked at him, a softness of fatherly duty and love.

“Carlos” his father spoke to him in a deep, raspy, and masculine voice. “On this ninth year, I present you with the responsibility of the sword. It is as much a curse as it is a boon, my son. In your hands, you now hold justice itself. An instrument of the people and the cruel arm of justice herself.”

He paused, moving backward, finally sitting down on the golden and shimmering surface of his throne. Behind him rose the great twin oaks of the Wyrwood. Frekya, the goddess with her resplendent flowers of topaz, amethyst, and sapphire that shone brightly amongst her emerald Leaves and silver cast branches stood on his left, and Grenythal the God of the wood with his iron and thorn-covered trunk bare of both leaves and flowers, but instead with hanging fruits of pure amber which glowed with an undying ethereal light brighter than any alchemical fire but dimmer than that of the roaring hearth fire.

“It will be your will within only a decade to rule in my stead, to use the sword in service of the kingdom.” He continued, sipping from a chalice that a young servant in a lacey shirt and blue servants coat with little meticulously polished coat buttons had brought to him. The servant bowed as the king took the chalice, bowing so that the white powdery wig nearly touched the smoothly polished marble of the white palace floor before silently dissipating from view like the way steam escaped the surface of a freshly roasted hog.

“Yes, a curse” he continued continuing to nurse the frothy contents of the chalice. “terrible, yet necessary. For the good of all, yes, it is a terrible burden. You will soon understand.”

The king cleared his throat. “Today is your birthday and so I give you leave to enjoy the last days of your childhood. Your mother has arranged for all the usual pleasantries. From this day on though, you will learn the ways of statecraft and you will carry that sword with you as a symbol of your duty, your honor. Its weight will grow familiar because you will never remove it except to bathe, but not even to sleep. It will be your new best friend. It will cling to your side like a newborn cling to the breast of its mother. You will do these things, or you will feel the sting of the whip of the headmaster. The fate of our kingdom will depend on it, my little prince. You are but a cub now, but soon you will be a bear.”

“Yes, father” Carlos had said in a canned voice the words had fallen from his lips automatically as if they were breaths. He remembered the pride he had felt, the naivety of childhood twisting his daydreams into visions of heroic deeds of kingship, visions of conquering evil incarnated into faceless hordes of men and shadowy monsters of the wood and bog. He dreamt of empire imaging himself as a benevolent king bringing order to the lawlessness of the barbarians who existed beyond the wooded walls of the Wyrwood.