A heavy fleshy Thud and a gasp for air filled my ears as my senses flashed and my eyes opened to the dark dank stone room, the walls were large masoned stone blocks stacked on one another and the floor was crooked slates barely held together by cement or some other binding to make tiles. Blood stained the right corner of the room where shackles hung from metal clamps on the wall, a skeleton limply lay in tattered clothing with a table next to it with a leather bundle of torture implements as well as a broken sword and a few small pieces of armour.
A cold chill sent a shiver up my spine as the air of the room hit my naked body, though I wasn’t sure what was going on I made the quick effort to take the clothes from the skeleton. A red soaked grey tunic and dark brown trousers, a belt to hold them up and leather knee-high cavalier boots.
They didn’t quite fit, being a size larger than myself, but it was better than being naked.
Looking around the room again the sconces that sided a doorway flickered and shifted with the breeze entering the room, the doorway was pitch black past the metre or so of light the sconces provided.
My thoughts were dry of reason and my memory lacked any punch as I tried to draw on where I was and what I was doing here but nothing came up.
All I was left with was-
“Where am I?” I asked into the ether to no response that wasn’t the whistling wind outside the entry.
The blank walls left much to be desired with no clear way for me to have gotten here other than the dark doorway, dressing the armour to my shins, forearms and shoulders. I took the broken sword and prepared myself to step out into the unknown.
‘Answers won’t come to be standing around, no matter how many times I look at the ceiling for them.’ The thought crossed my mind as I gripped the hilt of the weapon.
With its semicircular pommel, leather bound hilt and bronze cross-guard with its rigid straight blade that was snapped off roughly forty or fifty centimetres up the fuller I had more than enough of it left for my mind to compare it to images of certain seafaring raiders I knew from my past obscured as it was.
Taking a deep breath I stepped into the dark.
Break
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Break
At first I was blinded by the sudden influx of like as I found myself in the entryway of some large room, the walls were twenty feet tall, pillars lined the sides of the room and an old mouldy red and gold embroidered carpet went from the door all the way up to an archway decorated with gleaming purple crystals illuminated by the ten or so braziers throughout the stone room. The archway had a corpse under it, the skeletal remains dressed in even less than I was, the ground around him had soot covering it and the clothing was melted into the bones.
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I couldn’t tell where the archway led, or what it was for considering I’d just entered through that cell-
“What the-?!” My mouth got the better of me as I turned and found the doorway I’d entered from didn’t lead back into a cell but instead in its place a pair of four metre tall oak doors with a log for a brace-latch barring my way out.
I didn’t even attempt to lift it, I’d always been weak, but this would be a fucking joke for me to try move as I was.
Honestly I wasn’t confident in the sword protecting me if I had to use it.
‘But I’m here anyway, so I have to make do with what I’ve got.’
Sighing I walked toward the archway, the towering columns along the way casting long shadows over the tiles, far as I could tell as I walked there wasn’t anything but empty space behind them. My tepid footfalls echoed off the walls as I approached the structure that stood as tall as the oak doors, green moss corroded the nooks and crannies of each block of carved stone.
Stepping under the arch I knelt down and touched the soot painted floor rubbing the matte substance between my index finger and thumb.
My brow furrowed as I took a long look around the arch and at the scorched remains.
Exhaling through my nose I reached for the foot of the skeleton that was close enough for me to grab, it broke off without any effort and I moved out from under the arch and threw the bones back toward its owner-
The howling screech of flames pouring out of three points, on either side and from directly above, was deafening and the sheer heat that bulged out of the red and orange plumes lapped at my arms as I held them up in front of me to block the heat-
“AhhH!” A scream left my lips as the flesh on my forearms bubbled and boiled as it melted.
Stumbling backward I fell onto my ass writhing and screaming in pain, howling as the cool air rushing through the room made it worse. Tears poured from my eyes as it became too much for me as my vision faded black an awful metallic scraping and clunking filled the air.