Finally, the walls began to widen. The grey stone gave way to red dust.
We emerged from the canyon into a new hell.
A rocky wasteland stretched out before us. The ground was hard-packed red clay and jagged stones. The heat rising from the ground distorted the air.
And there, in the distance, sitting like a tumor on the landscape, was an outpost.
It was a fortress built for war. High walls made of sharpened wooden logs formed a perimeter, reinforced with iron bands. A massive wooden gate stood closed, flanked by watchtowers where archers patrolled, their silhouettes dark against the sky. Puffs of black smoke rose from inside the walls, forges, or kitchens, or something worse.
As we got closer, the sheer scale of it became apparent. It wasn't a temporary camp. It was a permanent scar.
"Open the gates!" A voice bellowed from the walls.
With a groan of heavy timber and chains, the massive gates swung inward.
The convoy rolled inside.
The interior was a hive of activity. It was colder in here, shadowed by the walls, but alive with the noise of an army. Soldiers marched in drills. Blacksmiths hammered on anvils. Carts were being loaded and unloaded.
The smell was intense unwashed bodies, horse manure, smoke, and fear.
Our wagons were directed to a holding area near the eastern wall. We parked next to a row of other empty cages.
"Unhitch the horses!"
Guards swarmed the wagons. They worked quickly, unbuckling the leather harnesses and leading the tired animals away toward the stables.
A group of three guards marched up to our cart. One of them, a heavy-set man with a ring of keys on his belt, unlocked the door.
CLANG.
It swung open.
"Get out! Now!" the guard shouted, banging his sword against the bars.
I flinched. Fear, cold and sharp, spiked in my chest. This was it. We were here.
I tried to stand. My legs were numb from sitting for weeks. My knees buckled, and I grabbed the bars to steady myself. Pain shot up my legs, pins and needles exploding in my feet.
"Move it!"
I stumbled forward, stepping out of the cage and dropping to the muddy ground. My legs gave out, and I fell to my knees, panting.
Behind me, the broken man crawled out, struggling to stand, his chains rattling.
I forced myself up. I couldn't look weak. Weakness meant death.
I looked around. The other carts from our convoy were unloading.
Prisoners were spilling out, confused, terrified, bleeding. I scanned their faces frantically.
I saw the woman who sold flowers in the village, her dress torn. I saw the blacksmith's apprentice, weeping openly. I saw faces I recognized from the festival, stripped of their joy, reduced to cattle.
I searched for chestnut hair. I searched for broad shoulders. I searched for twin bundles.
I scanned every single face. Every weeping woman. Every broken man.
They weren't there.
Roxas wasn't there. Sylvia wasn't there. The twins weren't there.
My knees nearly gave out again, but this time from relief.
A small, hysterical laugh bubbled up in my throat, which I quickly swallowed.
They made it.
Whatever happened that night... they weren't in the cages. They weren't here in this hell.
I stood there in the mud, shackled and broken, surrounded by enemies, and for the first time in weeks, a tiny spark of hope ignited in my chest.
I'm alone, I thought. But they are free.
The relief of not seeing my family was a cold comfort, quickly overshadowed by the reality of where we were.
I looked around at the huddled mass of prisoners being unloaded from the other carts. There were faces from Brent, yes the seamstress, the butcher's son but there were so many strangers. Men with rougher, darker skin than the people of my valley. Women wearing tunics woven with patterns I didn't recognize. We weren't the only ones.
"Move it, filth!"
A guard slammed the butt of his spear into the back of a man who wasn't moving fast enough. The man stumbled, gasping, but the guard didn't let up.
"This way! Line up!"
We were herded like cattle toward a low, squat building near the back of the fortress. It was constructed of dark, rough-hewn stone and reinforced timber. There were no windows. It looked like a tomb sitting above ground.
Two massive wooden gates, bound in iron, groaned open as we approached.
The smell hit me before we even crossed the threshold. It was a physical wall of stench, a thick, suffocating cocktail of unwashed bodies, human waste, mold, and stagnant water. It was the smell of rot.
"Inside! Now!"
The guards shoved us forward. I stumbled over the threshold, my chains dragging heavily on the stone floor.
As the gates slammed shut behind the last prisoner, the sunlight vanished. The world turned into a realm of shadows, illuminated only by the occasional flickering torch mounted high on the walls in iron sconces. The air instantly dropped in temperature, becoming damp and clammy.
We were marched down a long, echoing corridor. The walls were made of cold, grey stone, slick with moisture. The floor was uneven flagstone that caught the toes of our boots and tripped the weak.
To my left and right were cells.
They were barred with rusted iron, stretching from floor to ceiling. I peered into them as we shuffled past.
They were packed.
In one cell, an old woman sat rocking back and forth, muttering a prayer to a god that wasn't listening. In another, a man gripped the bars, his face pressed into the gap, whispering, "Water... please... water..." to the passing guards.
A guard walking ahead of me swung his baton, smashing it against the man's fingers.
CRACK.
"Hands off the bars!" the guard roared.
The man screamed, recoiling into the darkness of his cell, cradling his shattered hand.
We kept moving. I saw children some my age, some older huddled together for warmth in the center of their cells, their eyes wide and reflecting the torchlight like terrified animals. In another cell, two men were fighting over a scrap of cloth, rolling in the filth while others watched with dead, hollow eyes.
The hallway seemed to stretch on forever, a gallery of misery.
Finally, we stopped.
The guard at the front unlocked a heavy door to a large cell on the left. It was a massive enclosure, easily big enough to hold thirty people, though the air inside looked stale and heavy.
There were already figures inside nine of them. They were huddled against the far wall, looking up at us with a mix of fear and resignation. They looked gaunt, their clothes hanging off their frames like rags.
"In! All of you!"
The guard grabbed the shoulder of the prisoner at the front of our line, a woman from an unknown village and kicked her violently in the back.
She cried out, stumbling forward into the cell and crashing onto her hands and knees on the dirty straw.
"Move! Or you get the same!"
I hurried forward, trying to avoid the boot. I shuffled into the cell, the iron shackles biting into my wrists. The rest of our group fifteen of us in total were forced in behind me.
The space filled up quickly. The new prisoners scrambled to find spots near the walls, trying to put distance between themselves and the door.
CLANG.
Here is the complete, smoothed-out ending sequence for Book 1. It bridges the moment he enters the cell with the final sale, emphasizing the passage of time and the dehumanization process.
The heavy iron door slammed shut. The lock turned with a final, grinding click.
I found a spot near the front corner, away from the waste bucket in the back. I lowered myself slowly, wincing as my bruised ribs protested the movement. The stone floor was freezing, sapping the little warmth I had left in my body.
I pulled my knees to my chest, resting my forehead on them. My head throbbed. My shoulder burned. I was hungry, thirsty, and surrounded by strangers in the dark.
I just sat there, listening to the weeping of the woman who had been kicked, trying to make myself as small as possible.
Time stopped having meaning after that.
I didn't know if it had been hours or days. The darkness of the cell was absolute, broken only by the brief, blinding intrusion of the door opening to throw in rock-hard biscuits or to drag out someone who had stopped breathing. The weeping woman eventually fell silent, not because she was comforted, but because she simply ran out of the energy to cry.
I slept in fits and starts, waking up shivering, my stomach clawing at my spine. I stopped thinking about magic. I stopped thinking about the past. I existed in a loop of cold stone and foul air.
Then, the rhythm changed.
The heavy iron door groaned open, but this time, it didn't slam shut immediately. Light harsh, grey, morning light spilled into the cell, blinding us.
"Line up. Against the wall. Now."
The command was bored. Routine.
I scrambled to my feet, my legs shaking from lack of food and circulation. I pressed my back against the cold stone, shielding my eyes, squeezing in between the silent woman and a man who smelled of vomit and old sweat.
Two soldiers walked in, their boots splashing in the filth on the floor. They were flanking a third man.
This man wasn't a soldier. He was dressed in thick, layered robes of deep indigo and grey, fabrics that looked too fine for this mud-soaked fortress. He held a wooden board with thick parchment sheets clamped to it. He didn't look at our faces. He looked at our potential.
He walked down the line, pointing with a long, manicured quill.
"Too old," he muttered, pointing at the woman next to me. "Waste of grain."
A soldier grabbed her by the arm. She didn't fight; she just went limp as he hauled her toward a different door. I didn't want to know where that door led.
The merchant stopped in front of me.
I looked up. I didn't glare. I didn't plead. I just stood there, breathing shallowly, trying to keep my shivering under control so I wouldn't look weak.
The merchant reached out. His hands were soft, smelling of perfumed soap, a jarring contrast to the stench of the cell. He grabbed my jaw, squeezing my cheeks until my mouth popped open. He tilted my head left, then right, checking my teeth like I was a pony at an auction. He ran a hand down my arm, feeling the muscle, then checked the shackles on my wrists to ensure the skin wasn't infected.
"Young," he noted, his voice flat as he scribbled something on his parchment. "Male. Six or seven cycles? Good bone structure. No visible diseases."
He paused, flipping my hand over to look at my palm. He saw the calluses. They weren't from a sword or a plow; they were from sanding wood and gripping stones.
"Worker," he grunted, losing interest. "He'll last a few years in the mines before he breaks."
He didn't ask my name. He didn't ask where I was from. To him, I wasn't a child who liked apple pastries. I wasn't a pitcher. I wasn't a brother.
I was an investment. An entry in a ledger.
"Mark him," the merchant said, moving to the next prisoner.
A soldier stepped forward with a pot of thick, black paint. He didn't ask me to remove my coat. He just slapped a wet, cold symbol onto the shoulder of the wool fabric the coat Sylvia had made for me with her own hands. It ruined the fabric instantly.
"Move to the transport wagons," the soldier ordered, pointing his baton toward the exit.
I walked. I walked out of the cell, down the long hallway, and back out into the blinding sunlight of the fortress courtyard.
A line of massive, iron-reinforced wagons waited. These weren't the open cages we arrived in. These were enclosed transport boxes, dark and airless, designed for long-haul cargo. They were hitched to beasts I didn't recognize massive, lumbering lizard-like creatures with thick grey scales and dull, obedient eyes.
I climbed into the dark belly of the wagon. It was already crowded with people marked with the same black symbol.
I found a spot in the corner and sat down.
As the heavy wooden door slammed shut, plunging us into absolute darkness, I felt the wagon lurch forward. The wheels groaned, beginning the long journey into the unknown.
I closed my eyes.
The movement of the cart was a torture device designed specifically for me.
Every rotation of the wheels sent a fresh, jagged shockwave up my spine. My ribs, likely fractured from the soldier's kick days ago, ground against each other with a sickening, wet friction. It felt like I had swallowed a handful of broken glass, and every shallow breath I took drove the shards deeper into my lungs.
My right shoulder, the one I had landed on when the shockwave threw me, was no longer just an ache. It was a white-hot, screaming void. The joint felt wrong, swollen and tight, pulsing with a feverish heat that made my arm feel like a dead weight attached to my torso.
I curled tighter, but there was no relief.
The iron shackles on my wrists had long since rubbed the skin raw. Now, the dried scabs tore open again with the vibration of the road. I could feel the warm, sticky trickle of fresh blood sliding down my palms, mixing with the grime and the cold sweat of fever.
My world had shrunk down to the size of my own suffering.
I wrapped my arms around my knees, rocking slightly with the motion of the cart, trying to separate my mind from the meat that was failing me.
It didn't work. The pain was absolute. It was a living thing, chewing on my nerve endings, reminding me with every agonizing bump that I was still alive.
And that was the cruelest part of all.