“A band of outsiders now walk the dunes, how interesting! Plucked from your reality and placed here, intriguing.” The older inhabitant of the dungeon croaked out. “Are your companions aware of your predicament? Do they care not?”
“Dunno.” The newcomer’s voice had recovered, though the same couldn’t be said about their wounds. The myriad bruises across their body ached in incredible pain from being beaten over and over again in acts of unrestrained and callous sadism. “They’re probably worried, not like they’ll find me down here.”
“Yes, yes. Many a companion have sought to free me of my shackles. Many a companion have fallen, unfortunately. I am still awaiting my end, as there are no companions left to try and free me.” Akaka let out a tired sigh. “Still, my crime was minor enough to be left here for a while. The ones above have things better to do than kill a crow like me.”
“Do you always have to speak like an old man?”
“Excuse you? I am but a young hatchling of twelve!”
“You sound like you’re fifty.”
“How rude, after all I’ve done to make your stay comfortable-!” Akaka sounded like a disappointed mother yelling at their kid.
“You cackled ominously and talked about how I’m going to die.”
“Would you rather I talked about the weather?”
“...”
“That’s what I thought.” Akaka let out a long sigh before saying, “Look, we are both condemned to die. Either through a very short and painful end or long and painful end. We can’t pick which we are given. The only thing we can choose to do is whether or not to let it end with regrets or not.”
“And how do we do that?”
“We talk. Is it not imperative for those on death row to bear their soul and make closure with their fleeting lives?” Akaka brought up a good point, no matter how creepy they sounded. “Would you rather hear my story? Of a young crow who picked too many pockets and was caught in a theft gone wrong?”
“No, not really.”
“I know I have implied it earlier, but you are quite the rude cellmate.” Akaka let out a long sigh. “Very well, very well. If that is what you wish, then so be it. It’s not like I haven’t already talked to death and back about myself, so please, go on. Even if the sun and sky have abandoned you, I won’t, I can’t.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Despite herself, the new prisoner felt a bit of comfort in that assurance.
-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
The group of thirteen students and their teacher continued to walk beside the river for hours, taking a break every so often to drink some water and let Pepe pick out roots and fruits to try and eat. The hungry were given a single piece of jerky to chew on, which they had to make last. Sure, they had four bags of the stuff, but there were fourteen of them.
Slowly, they began to talk with each other, for lack of anything else to do. There was no signal at all and there was no point in wasting their batteries, after all.
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“Hey, ‘Chidna.” Veni approached her in the afternoon a few hours into their walk.
“State your business with me.” She was at the head of the group and, while she didn’t have directions, it really wasn’t hard to walk down a river.
“You said you knew this place, right? Mind telling us where we are?” Sure, on any other day nobody would’ve taken her even slightly seriously, but that day was not any normal day. They were only starting to consider that she may actually have an idea of what happened and Veni was the first to swallow his pride and open his mind.
“Fufufu, now you see the wisdom in heeding my words, very well! As I said, we are in the realm of Ner, ruled by the overlord Mir.”
-/-/-/-
“Wait, what?” Akaka had a rare showing of genuine confusion as the new prisoner spoke. “Ner? Mir? An overlord? What in the world are you talking about? How could this land even have an overlord? It’s not been united for ages!”
“I know, right? Ugh, she’s so full of shit.” There was relief and kinship found in sheer disbelief of how utterly ridiculous the claims were. “Just, like, go along with it for now, alright?”
“Very well, very well. Continue, please.”
-/-/-/-
“Cool, cool. I mean like, what are we dealing with? Are there dragons and stuff? I mean, we saw a giant sandworm, who the hell knows what’s around.” Veni was also wondering how the sandworm would taste. Normally, he wouldn’t consider trying to eat what was effectively a giant burrowing snake, but he’d only had a single piece of jerky to eat in the past few hours as they walked miles through the heat with only umbrellas made for rain to protect them. “And are there people here? Are they hostile and stuff or like, what?”
“Hmph, fair concerns indeed. The land of Ner is an ever changing one. The land constantly shifts and there is no certainty that where you walk will lead to where you wish. There is only one way to be sure: By following the paved roads. Sustaining these roads are the great walled cities-”
-/-/-/-/-
“Again, none of this is true.”
“Yeah, yeah, can I tell the story now?”
“Fine, yes, but if you would, please may we skip the incessant prattling of faulty information?”
“Yeah, that’s fair. I was getting, like, super annoyed with it anyways.”
-/-/-/-/-/-
“I see.” Veni had been chewing on his allotted piece of jerky as Echidna went into great detail explaining the world. “Ok.” He walked off to contemplate if he wanted to believe any of the insane things Echidna had espoused and, if he did, the implications of everything she had said. Echidna smiled, obviously proud that someone actually listened to her.
“So, how much of that was bullshit?”
“Hmm!?” Echidna almost bit her tongue in surprise. “How did you sneak up on me? Are you secretly an assassin sent by the-”
“No.” Carmen gave Echidna an unamused look as she took a sip from Pepe’s canteen. “I’ve played enough poker to know when someone’s bullshitting and played enough RPGs to recognize bog standard ass fantasy worldbuilding. You were about to say the whatever brotherhood, some random murder cult dedicated to murdering for the god of murder or some shit, weren’t you?”
“So you are!”
“Whatever.” Carmen rolled her eyes and kept on chewing. Despite it becoming harder and harder as her teeth worked more and more out of it, the gum kept her mouth occupied so it’d stay in. “Don’t make shit up and lie. We don’t know what’s going on here and giving them the wrong idea could kill us.”
“Hmph, you speak as if I’m lying.”
“...” Carmen’s gaze drilled into Echidna’s eyes. While the self proclaimed destroyer of worlds had been obviously, or at least obvious to her, making up many parts of her exposition, in that moment she couldn’t find a hint of anything other than delusion in her words or soul. She was either a brilliant liar or absolutely convinced of her own lie. “Nevermind. Still, be careful, we could be in a different world from the one you talked about.”
“Perhaps, perhaps, but I think not!”
“Sure, sure.”