After receiving the coldest bath water, Darius had to clean himself in a dingy prison dungeon. His eyes had adjusted to dim lighting only provided by oil lamps on the wall. It seemed that everyone had to wash themselves before slavers put them into dark cells. There was only one little oil lamp at the far end of the hallway. Darius didn’t mind. He was used to the darkness, which seemed similar to his home cave. The cell seemed very small, and the rock walls of it didn’t budge at all. Darius carefully tried the door because it did not seem to have a lock on it but the clonking sound outside told him that he had been barred in with a metal bar on the other side of the door. Even the windows, if you could call them, were just very narrow cracks with iron rods. He could have barely fit his hand outside if he could have climbed to the height of the wall. His only options were the floor and the door of the cell. He did not have any tool to lift the door bar from the other side and the door was shut tight.
Darius phased around the tiny cell and weighed his minuscule options while trying a bit of this and that. The rest of the evening, he tried every stone on the wall and the floor. No loose rocks. There was not even a bed inside, only hay on top of the stone floor as a makeshift bed. No cracks on any stone, not even a stick or small loose rock to be used as a tool to scrape mortar. With frustration, Darius side-kicked the corner of the wall. Nothing else happened than pain since he didn’t have any shoes or socks to cover the impact. While cursing the dark realization came to his mind. It was the only option left, although a painful one. He could try to hit corner stone repeatedly and meditate his wounds away. If he could get a piece of mortar or rock, he could splinter it and use these as a tool to slowly dig a crack in the door frame and somehow lift the bar behind the door. Since he had no better idea, he commenced the task at hand. After several tens of hits, his hands and legs were a mess, and no seeming results had come about. Darrius didn’t worry about it he was too tired and hurt.
After meditating he continued this gruesome effort. The meditation helped not only ease the pain but to heal him, and it felt like he had more strength than he would have had in that situation. During the mealtimes, he only received a wood bowl of porridge but no spoon or anything else and he had to give even the bowl back every day after eating. He attempted to discuss something or misdirect the guards but only got curses for the effort. The small but sturdy metal reinforced hatch was the only means to the outside world from the cell. The door itself was always kept closed. Some slaves tried to yell or act to be sick, but nobody ever opened the doors and when they did the slave was taken away completely. Darius continued with the door corner rock. He could already see some minor cracks forming on the side of the stone’s mortar.
“That’s progress, you know, maybe a week or two and it gets loose.” Darius was amused by the dreadful prospects of his time in the cell. His hands were gruesome sight at best, and his legs did not fare better. Even the meditation did not heal the scars completely although all of the cuts kept healing despite repeatedly opening wounds. Since the meal was delivered to the whole hallway of cells nobody saw the condition of his hands, only the empty meal bowl with an unnoticeable fragrance of blood covered by all the other smells in the prison dungeon.
Night came again one day, and Darius was just beginning the good old kicking and beating of the rock when he heard screams and running noises. He could smell burning flesh outside when the voices went quiet. After a while, he heard loud, bellowing words outside.
“Hey Mathias, I have come to collect your final debt!”
Then the building shook almost entirely.
“You should have paid when you had your last chance!!”
Darius heard noises that he had never heard. The splintering of the support wood logs stonewalls crumbling down, large booming sounds exploding and shaking the whole entirety of the cells. It was too much for the structures, and the cell door wall ruptured badly, and only half cracked open door tilted to keep the rest of the wall from coming down. Darius immediately started getting himself through the narrow crack. He was overjoyed now by the lack of food for months because otherwise, he might not have fit through. Even in this skeletal condition, he had to give some hard treatment to his shoulder to get through the narrow cap. Nobody was seen, some wood logs were burning, and the smoke and dusty air covered the half-collapsed hallway. Slaves were screaming, and some ran in full panic into the hallway leading to the stairs. Darius waited a bit and went after them slowly.
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When he got to the final door after the stairs, he kept listening to what was happening in nearby rooms. He heard screams, fighting and thudding sounds of bodies or body parts going down on the floor. Someone was yelling
“We need to get out of here, Mathias. This time they send a fucking contract mage. Stop looting the money! We will die if they get to us! We have to leave NOW!”
Darius heard a laconic mumbling reply. He could not hear the words, but he knew that it was the black hooded bald guy who he had met earlier. It seemed that Mathias was in deep and not in a good way. *Let’s see if your greed will kill you, Mathias* Darius smiled and waited for hurried voices to go further. He waited behind the door in case of them heading underground to some secret passages. Nobody came after all, and he ventured into half-broken rooms full of corpses and blood in the next silent minute. Some of the rooms were on fire, and Darius could see large burning holes in the outer wall of the building. Even stone walls were half melted, and hot support irons had started minor fires here and there in the building. All the window glasses were smashed as some immense explosion had happened.
Darius didn’t have the time. He had to take what he could and get the hell out of where he was. He went in the direction of the room where Mathias and his criminal friend had been a moment earlier. While going about, Darius took a tablecloth from one table and went inside the room. There he saw all manner of coins and items on the floor, an open safe and papers everywhere, some of the papers burning on the floor. *Okay, time for the payment for my troubles.* Darius smirked, put the table cloth on the table, and started throwing small copper and bigger silver coins and papers and valuable items, anything on the cloth. He even threw some books from the bookshelf and luckily found the alchemy tools from one box hidden behind the crashed shelf.
After one minute of ferocious item throwing, Darius gathered the knotted tablecloth, lifted the heavy clinking bundle on his shoulder, and started looking for any window to hop out without anyone noticing. Even in some rooms, he could hear screams and fighting going on without an evident need to participate. Darius didn’t take any chances and just went to one nearby room in the opposite direction where the front yard and big-holed wall were. Was it an explosion or magic that made the holes in the wall, he didn’t want to find out. Darius bolted into one corner room with a smashed window, looked down, cursed, and jumped on the stable roof from the second floor. He crashed on the roof with a loud thud, almost losing a grip on the bundle. Darius took a wincing, pain-filled breath and went again down the cobblestone street. Albeit his side hurt a bit, he started limping to run from the burning and broken building in a dark alleyway.
Darius ran through half-empty dark streets while trying to find anywhere to hide. He turned a few streets while running and came into a more quiet part of what seemed like slum buildings. Dirty huts built with mixed materials were everywhere as far as he could see them. He started walking more slowly and looking for any movements and people. He managed to enter the slum without anyone seeing what he was carrying. Maybe he had saved some luck on the miserable trip. Finally, he found a narrow corner in the side of the alley where people had thrown all garbage. Soon he noticed that the corner was lower than other parts of the street, and there was a sewer hatch half covered by a thrown-out broken barrel. Darius moved the remains of the barrel quietly and looked around. When he could be sure nobody had seen anything, he lifted the hatch and climbed into the sewer. When Darius got underground, he dropped the bundle of items on the stone floor and knelt next to it to meditate. Despite the stench, Darius kept thinking he was lucky to escape his slave life. He released a sigh of relief, and in the dim darkness of the sewer, he meditated first time in a long time as a free man.