Chapter #2: The Jailer
Saxon approaches this open door, thoughts swirling through his mind. Such as, “Why is this one door open?” and “Why are these torches lit?”. Still, with nothing to lose, he still enters through the door regardless. As he steps into the hallway he gets hit by a sudden draft of air, chilling him to the bone.
He only has time to focus on this for a second, however, as he hears the door behind him suddenly lock. In desperation, he shakes the door hoping that it will give under his weight. Unsurprisingly, his efforts are fruitless. Presumably, the prior draft in the room had pushed the door shut, yet Saxon’s gut suggests otherwise.
Hesitantly, Saxon makes his way down the hallway, putting his focus on walking as silently as possible. In this focus, he fails to notice that one of these stones is raised slightly higher than the rest. As his foot brushes the stone, he feels it shift mechanically underneath his weight. Before he has time to move, a metal cage falls from above, trapping him.
Saxon tests the bars with a shake, and they do not budge in the slightest. Hopeless, he sits with his back against the bars and begins to think. Again, Saxon tries to remember his purpose, hoping for some sort of sudden epiphany. Similar to his previous attempts, a cloudlike fog prevents him from getting any sort of answer.
Disheartened, he rests his head on his knees and closes his eyes. Nevertheless, he suddenly has an idea. In clear Saxon fashion, he lifts the stone out of the pressure plate. He eyes the stone with evident hope that this will break through the cage door. He reasons with himself that it worked before, so he might as well give it a shot, right?
He aims, cocks his arm back, and sends the stone hurdling towards the other side of his enclosure. With a loud metallic clang, the rock does a 180 and flies back towards him. It blows right into his stomach, knocking the air out of his lungs. Fighting to breathe, he falls to the floor attempting to regain his breath. This would be the last time Saxon tries to solve his problems using geology. He hears a sudden cackle from the end of the hallway,
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“Ha-ha you fool! Did you really think that would get you through these metal bars?” says the raspy voice, making a slight echo through the hallway.
Saxon sees the figure moving closer towards him, allowing him to see the speaker’s features in their entirety. Saxon makes a quick note of this woman’s sunken cheekbones and soulless eyes. He feels his heartbeat quicken as he notices her presumably blood-stained apron. Under further inspection, he notices that the skin around her mouth had been stained red with blood. He feels his gut wrench in fear as he makes the logical assumption that this woman is a cannibal.
His mind suddenly remembers the stories adults would tell children to make sure they came home before nightfall, warning them of cannibalistic tribes in the forest. Saxon had always been a rebel, so he had experienced the forest in its entirety, day and night. However, he had never stumbled across a cannibal, so he assumed that they were entirely fiction. Yet this moment now suggests otherwise.
His thoughts are confirmed when he hears the raspy voice speak again.
“Oh, you poor thing, you aren’t even worth eating. You’re just skin and bones!”
After a long extended pause, she continues. “Although I can’t just let you escape and go warn the others” she states with glee in her voice, excited for her next kill.
Saxon’s thoughts quickly shift to the idea of others. “There are others?” he wonders, and considers asking the woman, yet he remains in silence. Instead, he starts pondering the options of his escape, which of there are not many. He then reasons that his only escape would be risking hand-to-hand combat, he quickly scans the woman’s waist, looking for a holstered weapon.
He then hears an unanticipated woosh sound and feels a prick against his shoulder. He looks over to see a small dart sticking out of his arm, filled with a small amount of pink liquid. His last thoughts before becoming unconscious are “damn, I really messed up, didn’t I?”