Legacy

Chapter 15: Solving by Sunlight

The room was ridiculously dark, the side walls compressing the space whilst the wall furthest away from me stretched out, losing itself in the dim shadows. My hand splayed out, hitting the wall at my back, using my senses to expand my knowledge of the room. It was stone - I was pretty sure anyway - a rigid, unyielding stone with softer, slightly gleaming vegetation sprouting from some of the stone's borders. There was a slight breeze shimmying through the room, lightly lifting the hairs on my head.

I shifted, trying to ease out the kinks out of my backs and startled as a jolt of pain shot through me. Swearing, my gaze flickered down: meeting dark stone ground with water splashed across it here and there - and then a dull blue electric ring of energy encircling my ankles. Each ankle had its own restraint, the energy levitated from a simple silver band of metal chafing at my legs.

"Oh, fucking great," I cursed, the words keeping me sharp in the tense silence. As my words ripped out of me, I heard the sound of water slapping against the walls - coming from the long-stretching other end of the room. You're not alone in here, Katarina. Water lapped out of the darkness and kissed my bare feet (of course my feet were bare, they didn't even have the decency to give me a pair of shoes in here).

But then the water reacted with the energy restraints and pain seized my body as it crackled, forcing my neck to bend and push my head backwards, teeth gritted together. The spasm stopped but I kept my gaze upwards, my panting breaths making icy clouds in the air. A way out. I'd missed it before - but of course, the source of the breeze - the wire-meshed grating positioned about a metre or two above my head.

I tried to shuffle to standing, propelling myself up with my hand clamped around an extruding stone. The convulsions started before I was even fully vertical and I slammed into the wall, sweat dampening the back of my shirt, my face pressing into the wall and my mouth inhaling grit.

Think, Katarina, think, I stressed to myself, carefully pushing myself frrom the wall.  Figure out a plan of strategy.

They were four questions I needed to answer to escape this cell. 

What kind of cuffs were binding my ankles right now? How would I get them off? How would I breach the distance to the ceiling grate and get out? And finally -

A low echoing chittering came from the other end of my cell. My final question.

What else was in the room with me?

Water inched out of the darkness, in synchronisation with the creature's movements. I watched in drawn-out dread as the water ate out the space between me and it, darkening the stone until it reached - and the pain was there, little lightning-shocks of torture dancing all over my body until - over. 

It had been less, I was sure. Less pain, this time - the tiniest reduction in time and strength of the attack. My eyes drew down my legs, catching sight of the silver and the ruin of red chafing it was making on my skin. I grimaced, my mind encircling a solution to one of my questions. Was it movement that both incited the attacks but then decreased their power?

 Well, I thought, a bitter smile lacing my lips with resigned poison. Only one way to find out.

I hurled my body to full vertical, the seizures taking me with the first sudden movement. My hand was clamped onto the wall, nails pressing into stone - bending and whitening and bleeding - as I let loose a guttural scream, my anger becoming an animal in verbal form. No. The rejection came before the pain had ended - it was no less, I was sure.

Sweat had gathered on my back, surely glistening in the sparing light that shadowed me through the ceiling's opening. Not movement then. My senses were disturbed by the keening in the darkness: the piercing wail that attacked my hearing: a whip gathering energy and lashing out.