Every morning, the devil comes by my cage to wake me. For him, silence is never an option as the thud of his hooves are heralded by the sounds of bells clanging, wandering whistles, and the jingling keys. In the background, the devil sings his daily tunes as he prances about from one cage to another.
Some in my position may make the proclamation “God cannot exist, for under his watchful gaze such cruelty should not exist.” I agree with them, for if he is real, then God is cruel to have allowed such an ugly bastard to have been born. Others may fear him, but I have never feared the devil. I only pity him, for ‘what is the devil but an angel who hath received no love?’
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“Up and attem, boys and girls, rise and shine. Here’s your slob, greedy little fucks! Now, be ready quick, today is the big day! Don’t wanna have to reward you little buggers for once, eh?!
Aliso groaned, shuffling slowly in his cot.
At this point, he’d spent about a few weeks in Iye – yet still hadn’t adjusted to the lack of natural light – or the constantly shifting cycles of light and dark. A difficult proposition under normal circumstances – made even more difficult by his constant flurry of tasks. If he wasn’t ditch-digging along the beachlines or traveling, ferrying a giant metal crate on his back for hours at a time – he was sleeping, usually in said crate. Last night was particularly brutal – having had to travel almost eight and a half hours, barefoot.
And so, Aliso lay in his bed, struggling to break their bond. While it wasn’t exactly soft and cozy – Aliso had found that any bed with even basic cushioning was a privilege to be cherished. So, it was little surprise to find that even his hard, cold, and bumpy bed still managed to ooze an inescapable charm – an innate desire to simply be, letting the world go by as you lay there, watching.
All of that was to say – Aliso was a tad too slow to rouse for Portus.
“Need special attention, Silver?” A nasty voice called out – a hint of glee sparking in his eyes spoiling his poor façade of neutrality.
Bobby Portus was a fat, old Ishara whose limping gait caused his key chains to jingle. He picked up his baton, strapped by his bulging belly – and lightly pressed it to the crate, activating its internal mechanism and spreading powerful volts of electricity through the metallic structure.
Aliso screamed – backside skin scorching and smoldering from the volts of electricity coursing through his body, leaving Aliso writhing in pain; internally from the voltage and externally from the smoldering skin.
Portus cackled – manic pleasure evident – as he smacked his baton across the side of the crate a few more times – sparing Aliso of the electricity. “Up now, Silver?” He stalked away – laugh ringing, chains jingling and hooves thudding on the ground as he walked away.
Aliso twitched occasionally – muscles convulsing from the repeated shocks it took to wake him. You’d think after the first stunning display of ineptitude – he’d have changed his tune, packed up, and begun scurrying about like ants in a storm. But Aliso was nothing if not stubborn – and stubbornly clinging to his bed, even through multiple shocks, he began to wear Portis down.
This fourth time the large-bodied, crocodilian creature came around – his mocking sneer was gone, in its place a mask of fury and hatred. He touched the bat to the crate for almost twenty seconds this time – and when the baton finally moved away from the crate, it crackled with lightning.
“We can do this all day, Silver.” He sneered – rattling the cage with a few powerful blows from his baton.
Both his words and actions were immaterial – of course – as Aliso was preoccupied with all the pain and screaming, body convulsing from the torture. His muscles simultaneously felt frozen and burning – leaving his entire body numb and convulsing. Having already inadvertently emptied his bowels on the second go around, the only substance leaving his body was the drool piling up by his face.
He found his mind couldn’t focus on anything – not even the pain any longer. Instead, it was simply a frozen haze of emptiness – a void of all thoughts.
Portus leaned over – and spat on Aliso’s face through the holes in the crate. “Lil more won’t do ye any harm, eh?” he goaded. When Aliso elicited nary a reaction in response – the jailer grunted in satisfaction and disgust.
“I doneno what ye think yere doin’ – but yere lucky. Arriving tonight – gotta keep the product top-o'-the-line. So get up, and get moving!”
Portus moved on – searching for a new victim to torment among the sea of crates.
Their party was currently camped in some wide open plains – nary a tree for as far as the eyes could see. Up above, crystalline light shone down upon them – but this time the entire ceiling had been lit, unlike the patterns it usually formed in. The light cast few shadows upon the land – only small shadows beneath one’s self, almost invisible to the naked eye.
Aliso preferred the dark – one of his few vestiges relating to his life before the escape. Before the farm. Before Iye. Seeing the land – practically glowing beneath the clear light – he felt an all-encompassing sense of emptiness. He longed to be like the land – free and just. The land could do no wrong – and for once, Aliso wished he could feel like that.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
After almost half an hour – Aliso finally came to his senses. Portus hadn’t stopped by again – busied arguing with someone Aliso had never seen before.
With nothing else to do – Aliso finally extracted himself from the bed, although a part of him wished to jump back in and disappear between the sheets. He wiped himself down as best he could – covered in vomit, piss, and feces – but there was little in the crate other than his bed – so he mostly stewed silently – anger and helplessness building.
“Why don’t you just get up?” Teddy asked – scooping up some Fluer between his fingers and swallowing. Shaggy orange hair, a thick beard, and a powerful frame, Teddy sat cross-legged on the cot of his cell, enduring his meal. “Every other day – the same song and dance. You’re not going to beat him, you know?”
Aliso got up – his short frame allowing him to stand without slumping or crouching – and began stretching slightly as his muscles still recovered from the shocks. He thought – with all the shocks – he would grow resistant to them. Rather – he found the shocks just as, if not more painful. In an ironic twist of fate, his body had instead learnt to recover quicker – so that it could be subjected to pain once more. He shrugged – scraping his shoulders against the iron bars and feeling a small shock, the lingering electricity grounding.
“I don’t know. Maybe I think he’ll give up, or finally just give up and kill me.” Aliso shook his head – trying to focus his mind again. “I just… I just couldn’t listen to him – not without protest.”
Teddy rose his eyebrows – gobbling up another handful of Fluer. “Liable to get yourself killed – for a worthless cause, mind you.”
“Yeah – well better to die for a cause, than live a worthless life.”
Teddy chuckled – spitting a bit of food out. “I agree – but this ain’t a cause, just the lashing outs of a child. You ain’t causing anything to change. Just getting yourself fucked up for no reason.”
Aliso sighed.
Neither had an answer to the statement – if there was even a question in it – so it hung in the air between them – constantly vying for attention. Aliso ignored it – as he did all the other questions lingering in his brain. Time in Iye had taught him one thing: better to leave the questions in the past, lest they torment you for the foreseeable future.
Teddy had tried to convince him more than once to drop the matter – this time resorting to tough love. He appreciated the effort his acquaintance, okay friend – however meaningless the effort. He didn’t want to admit Teddy was right – but Aliso was done bending a knee to the strong. He would die before letting it happen again.
He sat – pulling in his breakfast through the bars. Aliso hated breakfast. Well, more specifically, he hated breakfast, lunch, and dinner. More specifically, he hated breakfast, lunch, and dinner here.
He pushed his hands through the metal bars – picking up the breakfast thrown haphazardly on the floor in front of his cell door.
“Breakfast” consisted of two dead Kazhaki - small, grey ratlike creatures that are equal parts resilient and disgusting – garnished with a handful of under moss called Fluer – an unsuccessful attempt to mellow out the bitter flavour of Kazhaki meat– and a small glass of liquid… goop. Teddy had tried already – on numerous occasions – to convince Aliso that it was water. His efforts fell on deaf ears, however, and often had no comeback to the retort “Please find me another pool of water which is thick and green.”
He prodded the meat carefully – shifting his nose to avoid the pungent odor. To call this a meal would be a bit of an overstatement. A meal should be used to describe an edible arrangement of food. If a chef sold this as a meal in Dii Lainus he would be charged with Grand Larceny.
Nevertheless, Aliso bit into it – unsuccessfully dusting the dirt off its skin and trying not to vomit while he ate. Overtime, he found one of the benefits of being shocked was his loss of tastebuds – which came in handy to swallow the bitter and disgusting grey meat.
“Portus said something about tonight – that I was lucky? Any idea what he was talking about?” Aliso asked through mouthfuls of meat.
This time it was Teddy’s turn to shake his head. “Find out soon enough, won’t we.”
Aliso grunted – the two of them silently finishing the rest of their meals. After this – the entire lot of them would be let out of their crate, forced to travel barefoot and carrying their crates overhead. The journey had been brutal – and while Aliso tried to make good use of all the blood spilt, his clashes with Portus had far out damaged any small bits of healing.
Since he had fallen into Iye – and been captured by this band of slavers – his life had become routine. A miserable routine that constantly brought about violent or hopeless thoughts, but a routine nevertheless.
A routine of monotonous digging – among which he had developed his friendship with Teddy, and arduous, grueling travel – among which he had developed his rivalry with Portus, although another would laugh at that statement. After all – was it really a rivalry if Portus was always winning?
Twice, plans had been made for escape. Twice, a thorough reminder of the cost of freedom – after which another attempt was never considered. It should have been simple – almost a thousand of them against just under two hundred of them. But whoever was orchestrating this group had been intelligent – sectioning them off in batches of fifty or so – enough for a single guard to manage without allowing for the slaves to sow dissent that could create opportunities for escape. It was the common tactic – divide and conquer – and it worked excellently, keeping the entire group in line for the multi-week journey.
A journey – which only an hour or two after Aliso and Teddy had departed – finally came to an end. The entire time, no one told them where they were going. If you disobeyed, you were simply whipped until you started moving – or in Aliso’s case, stop asking.
He hoped that upon arrival, it would all be clear to him – like a foggy window clearing beneath the warm rays of the burning sun.
Instead – it felt more like the foggy window had simply opened a few holes – giving way to more questions. Such as, why can I see horses behind the window? Or in this case, what?
During his travels, he expected a number of destinations – mostly endings to his life, if he was to be honest with himself.
He thought they might be gathered up and sacrificed to an ancient deity – like his village had tried to do once before. Or he expected the destination to be like Levium – simply a myth, designed to motivate them towards an end, however vague. Or maybe they’d simply be abandoned – their metal crates trapping them eternally as they starved to death among the wilds.
Not on the top of the list - not even on the list, really – was their destination: a bustling carnival.