Entry Twelve

This is Rewel. The room is silent so painfully as an echo of nothing creates a vacuum in my ears. I’ve sat in the blind silence for minutes or days or years, but I do not know.

The footfalls outside are slow and heavy, reverberating outwardly, each in such volume that I cannot stop flinching. A door hisses open to the right of me, darkness filtering into the cell in the form of a silhouette. The footfalls enter the room rattling my brain. I see the foot, feel it connect to the side of my face, feel the wall that I crumble against. I see Speaker Arion, the skin on his face pulled tight over the latticework of wires; his dark eyes show nothing, but his lips peel back and the blinding light of the room dances on the silver of wires laced in his gums and teeth.

His foot connects to my head again. “What is he up to?” The words dart into my head with a ferocity that I almost retch. “Tell me what Matduke is doing.” Foot to head, I taste blood, feel it dribble down my chin.

Pain spreads down my neck, shoulders, envelops me and bans reality. There is nothing but the pain as he keeps kicking me. There is nothing but the bright blinding light and the force of his foot.

Eventually, he stops. He bends down and grabs my face, directing me to look at him. His face is gruesome: the pretty latticework of wires, twisted and contorted with anger and delight. He wipes of a spot of blood on my face, thumb pressing into a bruise. I do not wince because I cannot, there is nothing left in me.

He licks the blood of his thumb, not taking his eyes off me. “I will kill him.”