#janeva

Janeva tells him that the room is used for “temporary relocations,” that the violent and the bloodthirsty go in and come out docile, one way or another- that man is not supposed to exist so long in the dark.

They say this as they stand at the threshold of the cell as he stands in the middle of the space, straining his eyes to see as much as he can with the light that floods in from the hallway and the open door. The warden’s voice brings his attention back to them.

He tilts his head at them and asks if this is a temporary relocation.

The warden levels him with a blank stare. “That’ll depend on you, I guess.”

They close the door and the only light in the cell becomes the thin stripe falling across the floor from the eyeslot where Janeva currently regards him. “Either way, you can’t keep killing your cellmates. The Sun King can’t “rehabilitate” you all if you’re killing everyone else imprisoned here with you.”

They slide the panel closed and leave him to the dark.

It doesn’t take him long to pace the entire length of the cell, mapping out the meager features in his mind and spinning around a few times and fumbling around until he’s confident in his surroundings. He finds himself propping himself against a wall, chilly to the touch in contrast with the heat of the cell.

He spends the first however unknown amount of time contemplating his temporary relocation and the charges landed by the Warden.

They are right, technically, he has killed every fellow prisoner they have placed in his cell. His confusion stems from what else they expected from him. He is a tool for killing- killing people, preferably. Were they not wanting him to kill the prisoners?

…why in the sun’s name did they put them in his cell then?

His mind goes in circles trying to detangle the paradox presented to him. Logically, he knows it’s possible to coexist in a space with another person, he trained in the barracks like every other soldier of the Sundom. He hasn’t shared a space since then, however, nearly two decades prior. They had assigned him his own tent since his first campaign, out of reward or fear he had never bothered to learn. The other soldiers kept their bunking with shared tents. He had never thought to question why his treatment was different, it just was. It had suited him fine enough.

And now he had been assigned a cell in a similar fashion. But Warden Janeva said it like it was.. a punishment? To be honest, the solitude and the darkness appealed to him. But again, he could recognize that his experience wasn’t everyone’s truth.

He could see boredom becoming a problem.

But that was equally a problem in his previous lodgings.

Perhaps that’s the true root of the problem. Being “rehabilitated” as the Sun King so decreed is rather… tedious. Like waiting for a table of commanders to finish arguing over a table of paper and wooden tokens instead of just letting him take to the field.

He is not a creature of words or theories. The maps and mile markers on a general’s table will not win a war: his hands around enemy throats will prove far more effective.

He sighs in the dark, feeling foolish.

He’s getting worked up about a conflict that’s been supposedly laid to rest–getting attached to that particular avenue of bloodshed is pointless.

Perhaps he’s made a miscalculation on what exactly is required of him for “rehabilitation.” Well, at least he’ll have a question for the Warden when they return.

He’s so caught up in his thought he almost misses the flash of movement to his left.

He reacts on instinct, his right hand darting out to catch whatever threat has suddenly appeared and lets out a bur mused laugh as his right hand clamps down on his own left wrist. He must have been gesturing with his hands while he was thinking.

He strains his eyes in the murky dark and can just barely make out the outline of his hand and wrist, suddenly visible if barely in the dark. He watches, with vague curiosity, as the darkness slowly, slowly recedes into dim light–never enough to illuminate the cell or completely thaw his hand out from the shadows, but it’s enough to recognize general shapes and edges in the dark.

Curious.

Janeva had said the cell was entirely dark.

Wasn’t that the point of the supposed punishment? Scare the people of the sun with unending shadows? Not that he felt particularly threatened.

He stands, turning to observe the wall he had previously been sitting against. It’s indistinguishable from the rest of the darkness he puts his hands to work instead– running his fingers over the stone until he finds a gap. He finds it rather quickly, roughly the same hight as the base of his breastbone, slightly above where his head rested against the wall.

He squats down and presses his face to the wall, allowing his eyes to focus and find the angle of the gap. He’s rewarded with the sight of a small stone tunnel chiseled into the rock with a width no larger than the circle of his own wrist. The tunnel ends some distance into the thick rock foundation, highlighted at the end with a bright light from an unseen opening above it.

He watches the stone tunnel until his body is still and the light at the end dims away completely, leaving the room once again left in utter darkness, the outline of his hand before just a memory of sight.

Huh.

Did they design the cell to do that?

Or is it just an unintended consequence of nature, much like him himself?

He resumes his former contemplations, his thoughts returning like clockwork machines to the temporary diffusion of light, and he quietly eats the meal provided sometime later, waving off the questions of the guards outside as he returns to his newly designated spot along the wall.

Eventually, he sleeps. He’s awakened at some point by the sound of the door opening, Janeva standing once again at the doorway.

He has to blink away the tears at the light that streams into the room from behind the warden’s silhouette. It’s surprising, how quickly he’s become accustomed to the dark. “Warden.”

“Prisoner.” The reply evenly. “It’s been a day to the hour since we left you in here, hopefully the experience has been enlightening.”

He stores away that information, cataloguing a general sense of how much time has passed since he first walked into the cell and assigning a sense of a “Day” to the passage of the time. In the dark it’s impossible to tell time, but between the short hour of dim light and the meal served sometime before he slept a day having passed sounds rather reasonable.

The Warden continues, “Are you going to kill your next cellmate?”

“Yes.” He is honest, if nothing else.

The Warden sighs.

They turn and the door closes behind them. “As I said yesterday, this is all dependent on you. I’ll speak with you again tomorrow.”