I have drawn a dim light sigil on her room, and a small one hidden inside the white scabbard of Jillsenbane. Portable sanity, a luxury that I can afford as long as I don’t get too careless. Faking madness and servitude is proving to be a challenge, but one manages, hell yes, one manages!
The “Lady” does not pay attention to my actions more than she normally does. If I am arousing her suspicions, she is not providing any clue of it whatsoever.
“Where are you going with that piece of meat?” she inquired when she saw me shouldering an arm.
“I have a date with The Bear. She invited me for a meal, My Lady.”
“Okay... Feeding her is… you know what? carry on, I don’t even want to hear your reasons for this. Carry on, Pawn, feed the bear, play with her, take her for a walk around the palace, or do whatever. Just don’t do anything that would anger me or Gadorprims,” she granted, seemingly perplexed.
“The Bear and I are grateful, Lady Scarlet, dear Lady Scarlet,” I said, and strode away, directly in direction to the Bear’s room.
She had cornered herself, cringing against the furthest wall, right between two stalagmites. With fearful eyes she stared at me for a second and bared her teeth, before her attention snapped back to the light glyph I had left behind, and which had her cowering in that corner.
“Poor thing, you must have lived most of your life in this darkness. They caught you when you were only a scared cub, didn’t they?” I let the arm fall in front of her, and backed away, dispelling the light sigil, letting my eyes get used to the all-encompassing murk.
At first, she only sniffed the torn limb from afar, not trusting enough to touch it. She paced from side to side, looking at the arm, and at me, with her two eyes like preternatural torches.
Comprehension of what follows is paramount, and is that the bear eats, overcame by hunger, but she does so deadly afraid of the harm that act may bring forth. Her stare was not that of a dog with resource guarding, but of a caught spy biting the cyanide pill. She was the one dressed in black, but I was the angel of death.
And I may be projecting into an animal, into a being of unrefined and basic interests. Yet, is it not logical that the bear shall see me as another torturer, as a heinous, annoying creature with intentions unclear and unwise? It lacks, furthermore, the natural bond dogs developed with humans through millennia of domestication. She is a wild animal, and I need to constantly remind myself of that fact. Of the fact that men are not supposed to look for allies in bears. But right now it’s either a bear, or the self-imposed solitude of he who denies the friendship he holds with the dungeon keeper.
Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
I sat down and after extracting Jillsenbane from her (I feel the way I refer to my sword merits an explanation: I find “It” too impersonal of a pronoun, and the masculine gender improper for a sword) scabbard, I began drawing another sigil to fend off the fog of insanity.
What was it about sigils that their magic abolished the dragon’s? It couldn’t simply be the holy light they are made of, because the shine from Jillsenbane would purge the madness away. The secret had to reside in their patterns. I had tested numerous different sigils, from the simplest and cheaper ones to the most complex and exerting to make, and all of them yielded a similar result. It was, then, a characteristic common to each and every sigil, or at least most of them. Order, esteemed reader: the order of a sigil reflects the order of this, our reality. And so, no matter how the lines coalesce and wiggle, so long as there is meaning behind them, they drive the madness away. This is in concordance with the effect writing exerts on my psyche, extending my periods of mental clarity. What are letters, if not mundane glyphs, no less full of meaning than magical ones? Twenty-six earthly glyphs only children of the blue planet can come to understand. And so, by writing this with them, by wasting pages away, by burning this torch that routs out the shadows of delirium, I hope to reach you, earthly brother! Few are the natives that have learned our tongue. You, like the bear, you are a kindred soul. Maybe not born yet, most likely not born yet. Or not spirited away from our home world yet, to be more precise. Are you a man? A woman? A child? Do you enjoy my suffering, or do you empathize with it? Are you safe in your comfy home? Or do you live on the streets? Or are you another of my kind, an adventurer who thought he could eat the world just to end up devoured by this dungeon and what in it lurks? If the latter, please, were my zombie to be found, kill it for good. You have my permission. No, not my permission: In hereby impose upon you the duty to do so.
Again, I digress. I extend this unnecessarily. The thing being: I believe the glyphs scare the bear because they break the illusion she may be being victimized by. She’s no person, she cannot understand that she is being manipulated by a dragon. To break an animal’s alternate reality, more so than a man’s or woman’s, is to drive it mad, in some way the logical side of my mind can conceive but not emulate. To put it in a metaphor, we could say that amputating a sick limb is still doing permanent damage to the body, despite it being necessary for survival.
I need to wait until the bear sleeps, and draw some enduring sigils on her skin then. Or, hell, not even sigils, I’ll just use the holy light to engrave her name among her hairs, whatever it may be, whatever I may choose.