It wasn't the first time he had woken up in jail.

There had been another occasion, years ago and right after graduating school, where Jiru and six of his friends had made a bar crawl through Bangalore. According to Abhinav from 12-C, the trick to drinking all night was to pick the right chasers. A peg of 8PM whiskey on the rocks had to be followed by a can of KF light, and instead of the next whiskey you had to pick a bottle of Bro Code 10. Always munching on some spicy chakna in between, of course. As long as you drank enough to stay hydrated, you could get boozed up even past the point where it made you stagger-walk and still keep drinking. Supposedly it would even lessen the hangover the next morning.

The theory had held up for the first five bars they had hopped, but by number eight three of them had thrown up. They'd been sparsely eating though, so they decided to hit one more place for a "Beeeg baaang phinish, with a patiala peg and wun lasht beer" as Abhinav put it before they'd get food. Till his (literal) dying day, Jiru could not recall what had happened next. He did not even remember which the ninth bar was, or the fight that he was later told unfolded there. To be fair, details were sketchy on what had happened and how it had happened - which actually worked in their favor to get the charges dropped later on - and all the participants and witnesses to the incident (on both sides) had been shit-faced drunk.

Which was how, in Jiru's memory, one minute they were cruising down the road in their Uber van, singing 'Musafir hoon yaaron' and butchering the song out of tune at the top of their voices, and the next thing he knew he had woken up inside the drunk tank of the local police station, which smelled like vomit and piss and who knew what the hell else, to find his buddy Sarid passed out on his lap, where he was very comfortably snoring and drooling. As it turned out, the hangover theory had been wrong too - his head was splitting from a headache. A long and miserable day had followed over the course of which they'd all been sprung from lockup one by one by friends, relatives, and in Abhinav's case, a very pissed off girlfriend - which served him right, in Jiru's opinion. Jiru himself had spent the next forty-eight hours doing nothing but eating and sleeping before it became possible to function normally as a human being again.

If someone had told him back then that there would be another occasion in his future where he woke up inside a cell, and that it would be a far more miserable experience than the one that he had just went through, Jiru would have dismissed the claim, in absolute certainty that he would never again make the kind of insane, irrational and stupid decisions required to land himself in such deep shit.

Clearly though, his certainty would have been misplaced.

Unsurprisingly, pain was the first thing that he discovered upon regaining consciousness - searing pain across the back of his head, and not the aftermath of something as enjoyable as a booze binge - he could feel a throbbing on his skull, and knew that it was a physical injury. He hoped it hadn’t been a mace, and he really hoped it hadn’t been the cause of his blackout. Neither scenario boded well for his brain.

He blinked himself awake and discovered more pains: a broken nose below which he could feel dried blood, his left cheek which felt as though it had swollen to at least three times its normal size, his ribs of which at least one was broken for sure, his left arm which had been sliced across the bicep which was a surprise because he didn't even remember that happening. The only bit of good news was that his hearing had returned. His armor and boots were gone, and so was Zarhan's amulet.

The floor he was lying on was hard stone, and felt grimy and dirty. Jiru lifted his head to look around, at which point he discovered that he was still suffering from the vertigo effect of whatever it was that Ferren had hit him with, and quickly laid it back down. He had to close his eyes for a few minutes to let the disorientation pass, then he tried opening them again to take in his surroundings.

It was a dungeon.

And not a dungeon with a capital D, like from gaming. He was in an historical dungeon. Stone walls on three sides and crude iron bars on the fourth, a hay bed (that he was lying next to - they couldn't have laid him on the bed, at least?), and a hole in the floor at one corner which he guessed was supposed to be a toilet.

One wall had manacles dangling from it, likely for the more troublesome prisoners.

Through the bars, he could see more cells. It looked like a hallway with the inmate cells on either side, and there were some kind of torches held in brackets attached at just above head-height in the space in-between cells, emitting a dim light. For a moment he was distracted by the lighting - the torches were not fire, instead there were egg-shaped bulbs at the top of the wooden handles, emitting yellow light. Interesting.

No windows.

Yup. Dungeon. The real deal.

Dungeon, noun: An underground prison, usually built inside a castle or keep.

Unhelpful to have that pop up in his head, but there it was.

It took him a while to be able to sit up without making the world spin. When he did, he noticed a disheveled looking old man in the cell across.

"What're yeh in for?" the old timer was curious.

"Wrongfully accused."

His new friend threw back his head and cackled like a villain from a B-movie, displaying several rotten and several missing teeth. "Me too, son, me too!"

Jiru decided to ignore him and pushed himself up on his arms to move over to the hay bed. His entire body screamed in protest at the meager effort, and the vertigo kicked back in, making him collapse on the hay.

"Every prison in deh whole world is filled with innocents, son," Rotten Tooth declared. "Yer in good company."

"Good to know, thanks." He grunted back. His voice was muffled; the swollen cheek wouldn't let him speak properly.

"Welcome to Castle Everwatch! Or its dungeon, at least. Hope yeh survive the experience." More cackling, as if that was a hilariously original joke. Jiru found himself wondering if the bad teeth had been a preexisting condition or if it had been caused by getting locked up in this place, and what exactly that meant for his own future.

Seconds ticked by, then minutes.

He lay there staring at the ceiling.

What boggled his mind was how quickly he had been outwitted. Of course the enemy had been on the lookout for him. Of course they had sensed that someone with the portal's marker had entered the world. Of course they had realized that this wasn't their ally. And of course they had been prepared.

Part of him wanted to blame the Guardians, but they had warned him that they didn't know the capabilities of whoever would be coming after him.

Should've picked the hedonism option. I could be in a brothel right now, getting drunk and pleasured by a dozen beauties. Instead I'm going to die in a dank and dark hole in the ground.

He continued to stare at the ceiling.

Was he going to die here? Rot to death slowly? Be killed by goons sent by whoever had arranged his imprisonment? Go insane? All of those were legitimate possibilities, and there were probably worse possible fates he hadn't even thought of.

They had underestimated their enemy, and by a huge margin. Someone had been watching the stonehenge-thing where he had come through. It was the only explanation he could think of: there was no other way the Captain could have been warned in time. It made perfect sense when he thought about it: if you were going to send a bunch of people to open a multi-universal portal away from prying eyes, where would you do it? The Living Wilderness was a great candidate. The bad guys had chosen Everwatch because A) They clearly had someone of influence embedded here; B) That made it easy to set up in or near the town; and C) Even near the road, they were unlikely to be discovered, because this close to the Edge people did not stray off the path for fear of danger - like the boar that he had run into.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

But Irfan had ended up dead, and that meant their plans were cancelled. So they had left someone to watch the portal and left, and that someone had seen Jiru, figured out he wasn't Irfan, sent a message ahead, and the recipient - the 'wealthy resident' - had set things in motion to manipulate the Everwatch authorities into doing the dirty work. Even only having a small window of warning, they had had enough resources and intelligence to get him captured and thrown into a prison. Would their mysterious adversaries know that the Guardians had had a hand in this, and if so, what did that mean for others like Jiru who served the Guardians?

Too many questions, and no answers.

Worse yet, he had walked right into the trap. I should've left that damn boar where it died. All the people walking into town on that road, any one of them could've been their suspect. Who knows how long it would've taken them to find me if I'd kept a low profile?

Instead he had announced himself with a hero's entrance.

"Heroes get themselves killed." his old drill sergeant used to say. "Heroes turn into psychopaths, murder civilians and commit war crimes, all in the name of doing it for their cause. I have seen all of that and worse. A soldier is not a hero. A soldier is someone who does what is necessary, and no more. A nation is not kept safe by the heroics of the few. A nation is kept safe by a million soldiers who stand shoulder to shoulder, using violence when and only when it needs to be used."

Madan Sir, wherever you are, I owe you an apology.

He hadn't even used the sword's magic in the fight! Detonate at least would have come in handy - instead he had relied on hand-to-hand fighting, old ingrained instincts taking over.

An hour went by, then two. At some point he remembered that Darkfang was bound to his soul, and that he should be able to summon it to himself. But, whether it was because of his lack of training in magic, or if he was being blocked somehow, or something else entirely, he could not even sense the sword anywhere nearby.

Eventually he was able to sit up, then gingerly stand. His broken ribs throbbed with each step, making him wince in pain as he walked over to the iron bars and tried looking left and right.

"There's somebody three cells over," The old man said, "Seen him dragged in here 'bout a year ago, maybe more, not sure. I hear 'im sobbing and screamin' every few days. And dere's 'nother wun, all the way over dere -" He pointed left, down the hallway, "At the last cell, I thinks. De guards leave food and drink there. But I ain' never heard 'em speak or make a sound. Might be they're mute. Been here since before I was. Other than that, it's jusht you, me, and Li'l Lirkosh 'ere."

Jiru followed the crazy old guy's gaze and saw that he was referring to a rat, which was comfortably munching on a piece of bread.

"I give 'im sum of me food, and 'e keepsh me comp'ny."

"How long have you been here?"

A shrug. "Can't count the days if yeh can't see the sun, boy. No way teh track time, so you lose it after a while. An' sometimes they turn the torches off and leave 'em that way just so yeh have to live in the darkness fer a bit. Been years, couldn't say how many."

Rats only live for two years.

It was the damnedest little detail that popped into his head. But that in turn meant that the rodent currently happily enjoying the bread was not, in fact, 'Li'l Lirkosh'. Or at least, not the original one, which had to be long dead. Unless rat biology and lifespans were very different in this universe, the old man was feeding whatever random rats that were running around and still calling them by the same name.

This wasn’t just a prison. It was a place built to inflict misery.

"This isn't the town's normal jail, is it?"

"No, it ain't. Yeh must've pissed off somebody real bad. Or real good."

"What about you? What'd you do get locked up in this place?"

"I'm innocent, 'member? Jus' like you."

"Sure, but what were you accused of?"

"Well, there was these two nice ladies who used to look down their noses at me whenever they'd walk past my shop… one day they was late going home and I thought I'd show them a real good time, yeh know?"

Great, I'm talking to a rapist.

"Uh-huh," outwardly he grunted noncommittally, "Let me guess, the town guards didn't like that."

More cackling.

"What about you? What wus the wrongful accusation that got you in here?"

"They think I'm an assassin."

"You ain't?"

"No."

"Well, you in here anyway."

"So it seems."

"An' once you in here, ain't no gettin out."

"Looks that way so far." Jiru turned away, sick of the conversation.

He sat against the wall and meditated for a while, hoping to ease his wounds.

Another hour went by. Or maybe it was two. You did lose time when you couldn't track it.

Footsteps broke him out of his reverie, and he looked up to see two guards walking through the hallway, their helmets leaving their faces in shadow. One was holding some supplies and two large waterskins, each big enough to hold at least five liters.

"Do not approach," One of them growled as Jiru tried to stand up. "Stay where you are."

Two drinking gourds were placed inside his cell, followed by a loaf of bread that was topped with a few small slices of tomato and garlic. The old man, who clearly knew the routine, placed his empty gourds by the bars and stepped back. The guard filled them from the waterskins and tossed a similar bread loaf through for him.

"Can you tell Captain Ferren I'd like to talk?"

"If the Captain wanted to talk to you, you wouldn't be in here."

"I have important information - "

A snort. "Right, I'm sure you do."

"I'm not lying. Tell the captain - "

"You speak again, I'll come in there and break both of your legs." The guard growled and raised the mace hanging from his belt.

Jiru bit down an angry response. He was in no shape to get into a fight.

The two men walked all the way over to the end of the hallway (where the last prisoner was, according to the old man) and came back, now empty of bread loaves.

It was a bit of a surprise to find out that one of the gourds contained wine (and decent wine at that - not swill), while the other held water. It made sense when he thought about it - the drink was likely to keep the inmates in line, also keeping them drunk meant less chance of trouble - and they were more dependent on the guards for regular resupply or withdrawal would kick in.

He currently needed some numbing for his pain though, so he drank it.

The bread was not fresh but it was filling. The water likewise had a slight taste to it but was drinkable. He saved half of it for later.

Then he went back to staring at the ceiling.

At some point he slept. For how long, he could not say.

The next day - if it indeed was the next day, there was no way to tell - his wounds were worse, and his pain was a lot worse. His meditation attempts were unsuccessful. He drank the rest of the wine and water and tried to sleep.

There was another inane conversation with his neighbor - he did not pay attention and could not recall what it had been about a few minutes later. At some point the guards showed up again. There was another loaf of bread, and his wine and water gourds were refilled.

After eating he slept again. When he woke up he could hear screaming and sobbing from a few cells over, someone begging for mercy.

He had slept twice - did that mean he had been here two days? Or had he merely slept only for a little while?

When he woke up after his third sleep he started making plans, more out of desperation and boredom than anything else. How long would it take for him to heal? He'd have to goad the guards in here and overpower them for a chance of escaping. And he'd have to make sure he was in good health before he tried. It would have to be soon, too. The longer he spent in here the weaker he would get, and once he started losing muscle mass, outfighting anyone would be impossible.

Out of good fortune or bad though, his plans were rendered moot.

Four guards came into the dungeon that day. They were dressed differently, and they were not carrying supplies. Instead they had chains to bind someone with.

"Stand up." One of them, a tall guy with a beard, snapped at Jiru. "And keep your hands where I can see them."

He did as instructed. The cell was opened and the irons were placed on his wrists and feet.

"Walk."

As he allowed himself to be led out Jiru could not help but ask, "Any chance you'll tell me where we're going?"

"The mayor wants to talk to you, assassin."