Loretta of the Lamp - The Fallout

The Girl who tricked me all along

She stayed pressed against the wall, barely daring to breathe as the soldiers came. The prisoners in the cells beyond that she had thrown the rocks at were making a loud enough noise to distract them, but she hoped against hope that their eyes were not sharp enough in the dark to make her out where she was clinging to the wall.

They didn't. Loretta breathed, and doubled back in the opposite direction.

She had two golden hairpins still embedded in the curls on her head, and the heavy old lock gave way to the bent end of one with ease. She wasn't sure what she had expected on the other side of the door, but it definitely wasn't another darkened passage. When she reached the end of the passage, she laid into the second lock with even greater urgency, soon discovering that Akil's prison lay within a maze of locked doors and underground tunnels. She was thankful that she'd had a moment of brilliance and locked each of the doors from the inside once she had broken in, and she could only hope that she'd be thankful in hindsight, because she had no idea at the time how she was going to get out.

Nine doors later, and she knew that Akil was on the other side of the tenth door. She knew it, just as well as she knew he had to have known she was there too.

"All your fighting to get home, all your fretting and anguish and suffering, and you finally got what you wanted."

Loretta's hand froze on the lock at the sound of the voice behind the door. His voice.

"Yet why am I not surprised to see that it was not enough for you, Loretta? What strange circumstance moves heaven and hell to bring you back into these cursed lands? You should have left us to our damnation."

She felt joy and pain in explicit measures at the sound of his barely audible sentences as she unlocked the door. She pushed it open slowly, unsure of what she would find on the other side. "Akil," she whispered into the darkness, as she slipped into the tiny cell and pushed the door shut quietly behind her.

"Loretta," he whispered back in a hoarse voice, "the girl who tricked me all along, has now returned."

"Akil, please," she searched for him in the dark. In the roof of the cell there was an opening, a long and narrow shaft that somewhere far above them broke into day. The pitiful light that fell down the shaft wallowed in confusion when it hit the open space of the cell, barely able to reach the floor with its hazy patterns of daylight. It was enough light to just make out the edge of Akil's form, leaning against the far wall.

"Go away Loretta," he said in a low and threatening voice. She could hear the clink of chains. Even locked within this complex prison, he was still deemed dangerous enough to be chained to the wall.

"I'm not leaving you here," Loretta told him in an even voice. All her hope in their reunion was fading fast. She had become caught up in the excitement of seeing him again, and now that she did, she realised she was too late, her crimes against him were too great. She took a step closer to him, and he shifted himself fluidly into a standing position. They had not hurt his body it seemed.

"Get out," he said.

"Akil, please! I cannot change what I did. I cannot change that it happened, though I have wished I could every moment that I am still breathing, from the moment I realised I loved you through to this moment right now." The profile of his face was silhouetted perfectly in the diffracted light from the narrow shaft above them. His jaw tightened at her confession of love.

Akil made her feel senseless things that no one else had ever invoked in her, like the strange sensation that despite his anger, all she wanted to do in that moment was touch his face and kiss along the line of his jaw. It was unbelievably irrational. They stood in the darkness, with only the dull patch of light between them for the longest moment, before Akil dropped back to the ground.