The nausea came in crashing waves, the burning spread from his skin to his stomach, and on the sixth day, he lost his sight. The darkness started as spots, like drops of watercolor with uneven liquid edges. Then it spread like a wildfire, engulfing his vision until nothing remained.

Siles didn't tell anyone. He continued to lay on the dirt floor as he had the previous six days of his withdrawal from the drug. He kept his eyes shut most of the time, but opened them periodically to check if his vision had returned. Retrospectively, he realized he should have eased himself off of the drugged food instead of cutting it off all at once. He hadn't known just high his dosage had been. But he refused to focus on the past. He decided the blindness was nothing more than a symptom. A temporary symptom, just like the fever and the twisting feeling in his gut. It would go away. If it didn't, and the blindness remained after the fever and nausea left, then he would tell August. But not yet. He didn't want August to worry.

On the seventh day, Siles awoke to a cool breeze, trickling through the boards covering the dungeon's half-moon window. For the first time since he had arrived in that dark and damp place, he felt good. He lay there for a moment, relishing the feeling. He doubted it would survive the test of movement. Movement would bring the nausea and the pain rushing back, he was sure of it. After Siles started to notice the hard dirt floor pressing against his spine, he opened his eyes.

A guard stared down at him. A frown twisted his lips, shades of green and blue streaked his irises, and several white hairs sprouted in the space between his salt and pepper eyebrows. Siles couldn't help but laugh. The guard's frown deepened, but Siles' smile widened. He could see. His hopes had come true. The blindness had been temporary after all.

"Has he gone mad, too?" the guard turned away from him, looking at August.

"I... don't think so?" August replied.

Siles quickly suppressed his euphoria. He shoved himself upright and leaned against the wall. For once, the ground remained steady beneath him. He blinked the sleep out of his eyes as he examined the guard crouched in front of him. The guards had never entered their cells before, not even to deliver their meals. Something had to be wrong. "I tend to laugh when I'm surprised," Siles lied. "Why are you here?"

"I am responsible for keeping important prisoners alive, and yesterday's shift informed me that you were unwell. They described you as sweating, pale, and unconscious during most of the food deliveries." The guard removed a glove and pressed the back of his hand against Siles' forehead. "You don't feel feverish."

"I feel fine," Siles said.

"You feel fine?" The guard frowned.

"I'm tired and I can't stay on my feet," Siles corrected himself to keep the guard's suspicions at bay. "But I assume that's because of whatever your people have done to me. Besides that, I'm fine."

The guard put his glove back on and stood up. "Regardless, I will have to bring you to the infirmary. The Queen would kill me if something happened to you." He extended a hand, and it took Siles a moment to realize he was offering to help him up.

Siles took the guard's hand and swayed when he stood, falling against the guard in a show of weakness. In reality, he felt fantastic. He wanted to leap into the air and relish the feeling of the steady ground when he landed. The guard didn't know this, of course. He led Siles out of the cell and fumbled to pull a pair of handcuffs off of his belt. He wasn't following the safety protocols Siles would have expected in a castle dungeon, but then again, the guard thought his prisoners were drugged.

Siles didn't wait for the guard to handcuff him. He knew that if he went to the infirmary, the doctors there would recognize that he wasn't sick. Worse, they would recognize that he wasn't drugged. He couldn't wait for Sonia; he had to escape now.

So he knocked out the guard. A quick uppercut did the trick, but Siles slammed the guard's skull against the cell bars just in case. The man fell to the ground and Siles paused, listening. The skull-to-bar contact had resulted in a louder clang than he had expected, but he couldn't hear any backup soldiers approaching to investigate the sound.

Siles plucked the key ring from the guard's limp hand and unlocked Penelope's cell. She skipped through the open door with her book in hand. She didn't bother to thank him.

"So what are we going to do about Sonia?" she asked.

Siles removed the guard's sword belt and plucked the knives from the holsters in his boots. "I don't know. Your Queen isn't after her. She is free to follow us back to our kingdom after she hears we've escaped." Though he wished Sonia could have been there to lead them out of the dungeons. She had given him a brief overview of the castle's layout, but verbal descriptions didn't translate to images nearly as well as a physical map.

Penelope's smile faded. "You're still going to release her friends, right?"

"Of course!" August patted her shoulder, and Siles saw a flash of light pass between them. In response, Penelope grinned and nodded in uncanny unison with August's own cheerful nod. Without the drug, it seemed that August's abilities had returned.

Siles watched the place on Penelope's forehead where the flash of light had disappeared, but the light didn't return. He decided to attribute it to residual vision problems. As long as it wasn't blindness, he didn't care. Siles buckled the sword belt around his waist.

"Alright," Siles said. "Keep quiet from this point onwards. Never assume we are beyond the enemy's ears, even after we have crossed the border. Understood?"

August and Penelope nodded. Siles plucked the guard's candle from the wall stand where he had left it and led the way towards the exit. He squinted at the white shapes in the cells and recognized the familiar curves of skulls and eye sockets. Teeth littered the path, crunching beneath his boots when he failed to notice them in time to avoid them. For a queen obsessed with holiness, Thalia had created a place surprisingly similar to Hell.

Eventually another candle greeted them from its wall stand, illuminating the wooden door beside it. Siles pushed the door open and it squished under his touch, rotting as mold and termites tore it apart. In the corner of his eye, he saw August's nose wrinkle. He and Penelope avoided touching the door as they passed it.

The door wasn't an exit in the way that Siles had hoped it would be. They had to be going in the right direction, since it was the door all of the guards had left by, but there was no staircase to the main floor behind it. There were just rows upon rows of cells. The only difference between the new cell block and the one they had left behind was that this one wasn't empty.

In the rows upon rows of cells, rows upon rows of prisoners stared at their unexpected visitors. Their eyes were as wide and round as panicked rabbits preparing to flee. Siles raised a finger to his lips and held up the key ring. Surprisingly, the prisoners followed his silent request. They whispered among each other, but not loud enough to raise any kind of alarm.

"Your highness," one whisper rose loud and raspy above the rest. Siles looked towards the source.

"Brigitte?" August whispered back. Siles barely recognized her face with its new coat of dungeon grime, but the royal alchemist's nasal voice was unmistakable even as a whisper.

"Can you get me out of here?" Brigitte rasped. She walked to the front of her cell, perfectly at ease unlike the wobbling prisoners around her. Siles felt a touch of jealousy at her poison immunity. He wouldn't have expected it to work with the anti-magic poison, but apparently the anti-poison was more powerful than the anti-magic.

Siles unlocked the royal alchemist's cell and moved aside as she stepped out. She waved enthusiastically at Penelope, then followed the gesture with an equally enthusiastic handshake. She introduced herself to her new friend with an excited whisper. Siles shook his head. Brigitte's time in the dungeons hadn't affected her eccentricity.

Meanwhile, the whispers grew. "Why did you let her out? Let me out." "Let me out." "Let me out." The sentence began to repeat like a mantra, steadily growing louder as the whispers compounded upon each other. Siles looked at the key ring. Without Sonia, it would be difficult to escape an unknown castle. With a distraction, it would be much easier. He dropped the key ring into the nearest outstretched hand.

"Let everybody out," Siles told the new keybearer. He ignored the man's ecstatic joy and continued down what he hoped was the dungeon's main path. August, Penelope and Brigitte followed close behind, their presence weighing heavy in his thoughts. He had never escaped from anywhere with a three-person tail before. And the tail was growing. The other prisoners were no longer quiet. As more of them escaped from their cells, more of those who had yet to be released raised their voices to catch the keybearer's attention.

A guard took notice and shouted, "Hey!" He walked towards Siles and his followers, his hand on the hilt of his sword. Siles was disappointed in him for not immediately unsheathing his sword. It was the sort of sluggish action that could give an escaped prisoner the opportunity to attack. Then again, it wasn't one of his kingdom's guards. The guard's bad training wasn't his problem. It was his benefit.

Siles didn't wait for the guard to realize his mistake. He flicked his own stolen sword out of its sheath and slashed the guard's throat, silencing his voice before he could call for help. His armor clattered as he hit the ground. Siles risked a glance backward. Brigitte and Penelope's faces had gone pale at the sight of the guard's half-severed neck, as if they were the ones leaking blood. August practically bounced with excitement. At least the person he cared about didn't judge him.

The second dungeon door didn't squish under his touch as the first had. It was still solid, having somehow avoided the moldy plague. Its hinges creaked as it swung open, revealing a staircase. They had finally found the exit. Siles ran up the flight of stairs and froze when he saw his surroundings at the top. There were five hallways. Sonia had said to turn right after exiting, but he had two rights to choose from. The hallways were identical, too, each coated in the kind of white plaster that reflected sunlight with a little too much shine.

August tapped his shoulder. "Why are we stopping?" he asked.

Siles retreated back down the stairs so they wouldn't be visible to passerby. He could see other prisoners beginning to climb the stairs behind them. They would have their distraction soon. "I can't remember where to go," he explained. "Sonia said turn right. But there are two rights."

Siles couldn't see his followers' faces in the darkness, but he heard an exasperated sigh to his left. August placed a hand on his shoulder. "I'll see if I can contact her. I've messed with her head before, so it shouldn't be difficult."

A flash of light illuminated the staircase, except it didn't. While the light was painfully bright against the contrast of the darkness surrounding it, it did nothing to disperse that darkness. Penelope and Brigitte's faces along with the staircase itself remained shrouded in shadow. Only August was illuminated, his cheeks glowing in the white light as his closed eyes quivered with movement. The light swirled around his head like a fog.

August opened his eyes, and the light vanished. "I found her," he said. "She says to take the farthest right of the rights, then take two more farthest rights. At that point I'll check back in with her to make sure we're in the right place."

Siles blinked, and blinked again. The light didn't return. He was hallucinating. Maybe he wasn't better after all. He shook off the thought. "Alright. August, you're going to have to lead us."

August nodded. He led them up the staircase and a group of prisoners followed behind them. While the prisoners burst into the hallway, running through the halls at random, Siles' group followed the rightmost path. Siles didn't bother to look out for soldiers. With dozens of escaped prisoners, the soldiers would have too much to deal with to pose a real threat. Instead, his gaze kept slipping back to August, searching for the return of the white light. It didn't feel like a hallucination. It felt like there was a pattern to its appearance and disappearance. He just had to figure out what it was.

~