A Dream of Honor

I.

It ends or it doesn't. That's what she always said, every time she found herself in some grotesquely sticky situation. She found herself in a lot of those what with her job involving heaps of crime and life-threatening adventures and all. By this point, she was desensitized to the feeling of her life being in peril.

So it stood to reason that she had no cause to panic with execution by beheading looming over her shoulder. She sat with her knees to her chest, her back pressed firmly against the damp stone wall behind her. What have you got yourself into this time, Odde? The door to her cell was iron and the spaces between them were too thin to slip through. The lock was on the other side and the guards had confiscated all of her lockpicks anyway, so there was no getting out the obvious way.

Alright. In hindsight, escaping prison with a five-thousand gold pieces bounty over your head and an extremely high profile (meaning her mug was posted all over the cities with a great big heading reading 'WANTED' on each of them) didn't make for promising odds. She had been caught before for a number of crimes - petty pickpocketing, breaking and entering, plucking something from a merchant's strongbox that perhaps she shouldn't have, but never had she stayed in a prison cell for more than four days. It usually only took her four hours to find a crutch.

She was on her fifth day. The odds weren't shaping up to be in her favor. Her execution was scheduled for the sixth, so that meant she had less than twenty-four hours to find something to get herself the hell out of here. It ends or it doesn't.

The thing with these cells (and this was applicable to every prison in Terathune, as Odde's people had been around for a very, very long time), there was always something hidden within the walls or the floorboards that would give way to some secret escape route. She had already tried tugging on the torch sconce, stomping on the ground, and pushing in the cinder blocks, which were all techniques that had worked in other cells she'd had the privilege of being sent to. The hidden trigger was meant to be obvious enough for imprisoned thieves to find, but not so obvious that the guards would investigate.

Odde was beginning to think that whoever carved these entrances got a wee bit too ahead of their self with this one. You outdid yourself, O Unknown Architect, she thought scathingly. You have bested one of the greatest jailbreakers in Terathune. Are you proud of yourself? She sighed, tugging mindlessly on the torch sconce for the hundredth time. Maybe it is time to start panicking.

Well, if she wasn't going to get out of here, and her death really was going to come to fruition tomorrow morning, there was no point in making the guards' lives easy. She opened her mouth and screamed.

"Hey!" one of the guards barked, coming over to see what all the fuss was about. His armor sported the colors of Termhes: Yellow and silver.

Odde slowly let her scream die off as she stared him down, blank-faced.

The armored man narrowed his eyes, wondering what her game was. "I'm watching you, sneak-thief."

She rolled her eyes when he turned his back and returned to his post at the door. She started picking absent-mindedly at the pebbles on the ground, trying to contend with the crippling boredom that replaced her need for an escape route. Perhaps the thieves of old had missed this place, though she found that hard to believe. These were the prisons of Termhes in the west, capital of the Vale, one of the seven provinces of Terathune. Very economically prosperous, Odde knew, judging by all the riches and coin floating around ripe for the taking. The dungeons were beneath the Sunstone Palace, which was where Odde had landed after a heist gone wrong.

Stupid Perote. If it wasn't for him, I'd be half-way back to Herebor, my pockets overflowing with gems and coin. That long-limbed, ragged-haired clumsy giant was nothing if not a liability. This was precisely the reason why she always preached independence for thievery. Partners were setbacks, especially ones that couldn't take a single step without tripping over their own ego.