Jere wasn’t sure how much time had passed. The boarded windows of the cells kept him shrouded in darkness. It could have been a moon or a month.
He was curled in the corner of his cell, his hands tightly pressed against his ears. His eyes adjusted only slightly since his confinement. He could make out the iron bars of his cells, as well as the stone floor beneath him. Beyond that, he could see nothing, except for the occasional shuffling of the screamer outside the doors. He was glad his vision had limits here.
Hearing was a different matter, however. At first, the screams were incessant, constantly echoing off the walls. The screamers droned on for hours, slamming their bodies against the bars of Jere’s cell. Jere had made a few attempts to communicate with Penzer, but the slightest noise from either of them would rouse the screamers into a frenzy. It wasn’t worth the effort. Jere had not heard from Penzer in some time and had no plans to reach out again.
While the screaming eventually died down, the creatures were never silent. Their screams atrophied into moans and grunts. Jere could hear the gnashing of the screamer’s nails against their own skin and the relief of bowels and the slamming of heads against walls. Eventually, a few of them began to cry. It was an unnatural sobbing; the sound of eternal torment, as though humanity clawed their way back to the most minute degree only for them to realize what monsters they had become.
Sometimes when the crying became too much, Jere kicked his foot against the cell door. He preferred the screaming.
Jere had not been entirely unfortunate, he quickly realized. Before the plague, the cells were mostly used as a drunk tank. Many of its former occupants woke up hungover and needed an ample supply of water to sober up. As such, Jere’s cells contained two pouches of water, holding about half a liter each. It was enough to stay hydrated for now.
Food on the other hand was a lost cause. Unless Jere planned to eat his fingers, he was out of luck. He wasn’t that desperate. Yet.
Jere’s next move was to remove his bonds. They were made of an incredibly strong rope, reinforced with reeds and yak hair. Even with all his strength he could not break free, so he was forced to maneuver around the knot with his teeth. It took many hours, and many times his yells of frustration stirred the screamers into commotion, but he eventually loosened the knot. Since then, he had celebrated his newfound freedom by covering his ears, doing his best to drown out the screams and the crying.
Jere dozed off once. He did not realize it at the time because his efforts were once again rewarded with a nightmare. He imagined Malefica yet again, only this time the witch was sitting in the cell with him. Her back was arched straight, a posture unnaturally proper. She stared directly at him, her two black eyes now eight. She laughed silently, her jaw agape as Jere finally saw her.
Jere only realized he was dreaming once he awoke to screams yet again. He worried the witch would be in his thoughts for the rest of his life.
Jere was torn. He knew he was safe from the screamers and the guards and Boah and his brat son. The only thing he had left to lose was his sanity, but that was slipping away fast. His cell window was barred shut and boarded up from the outside. No one was coming with food. He had no hope of escape.
“I have a rope,” Jere thought. “I have an iron bar. Could hang myself and save the trouble.”
Jere had not been a priest in more than a decade, but the thought repulsed him. Pike would be ashamed to know the concept even crossed his mind. Not that it was a sin like many others in Ostior believed. But it was a coward’s way out. He decided to wait until hunger became unbearable. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that he could be rescued after all, as slim as it may have been.
In the darkness, Jere thought back to his years in Port Algid, that frozen walled city where it never stopped raining. Back then he was but a student, spending his days reading books for moons at a time when he was studying for consecration. He recalled how the runes of old languages rearranged themselves on the holy scrolls. How despite his best efforts it would take him twice as long to read a passage as it was for the other students. His days became nothing but reading an indecipherable language about a subject he couldn't care less about.
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Then there was that pirate raid. Most hid behind their doors and prayed. Jere couldn't have joined them fast enough. He highly doubted pirates would come to his rescue this deep in the Eivettä, but it was a pleasant thought for a moment.
His thoughts then turned to Quartermaster Cahara. He was one of the few people Jere respected in his life. His first mentor, Sanctus Johanna, was a stern woman insensitive to his studious woes. Her only impact on Jere’s life was a few choice insults. But Cahara was different. It was he who took pity on Jere when he first joined the ship and taught him how to swing a sword and how to sail and how to navigate. He demonstrated not with words but with action, and Jere took quickly to the advice. After three years on the warship under Cahara’s tutelage, Jere had become the strongest sailor and the best swordsman.
The last thing Cahara attempted to teach Jere was how to meditate, but their ship was sunk not too long after that.
Thinking back to all this was Jere's comfort spot. The screaming became less overbearing as Jere grew lost in the pearls of Cahara’s wisdom. “Swing your sword not at me, but through me,” he had once said when he had been bested six times in sparring matches. Another time he once warned Jere that “An orange a moon halts maroon gum monsoons,” a clever riddle that held the secret cure for scurvy. He was also amused by the quartermaster’s insistence that “two crimpers and a long rope can save a ship from any disaster.” He should have told them instead not to attack the Lavast: Jyvask's invincible war fleet. For whatever reason they thought they were good enough to best it. They weren't.
As these thoughts cradled Jere’s mind, he caressed the rope in his hand. The same one he had briefly pondered tying into a loop around his neck. He was hit with a sudden realization.
Jere recalled Cahara telling the story of a mutineer who had hair that fell to his knees. He had been thrown in the brig for attempting to steal a Thalassian flag - a death sentence almost always. The lords of the ship argued over the fate of the man for three moons. After they came to the decision to execute him, it was discovered that he had vanished from his cell. He had taken his hair, wound strands of it together to make a tight, thin rope, and used it to file his way through the bar windows of his cell. The mutineer was never seen again, presumably because they didn't know what he looked like with a shaved head.
Jere’s hair was too short to file through the bars of his window. But he held a rope in his hands and it was strong. Far stronger than hair.
Jere got to his feet, doing his best to ignore the screamers. He felt his cell window. It was about a meter and a half high; Jere would have been able to barely look outside if it hadn’t been covered by the wooden panel. It was a tight fit, but large enough to fit through if he could squeeze by. There were six bars, three vertical and three horizontal, all iron but with a fairly small diameter of two centimeters each. Jere could wrap his hand around them.
His rope was almost a meter long and made with hundreds of thin threads. Jere slowly began pulling the individual threads apart, taking about ten before beginning his experiment. He figured one alone wouldn’t do, so he started with a rope of three threads twisted around each other. He wrapped it around the bottom half of the middle bar, pulling his hands back and forth. He did this for about thirty seconds before the thread snapped. Unacceptable. At that rate, he wouldn’t have enough threads before he ran out of rope.
He tried again with five threads. Same result in the same amount of time.
He pulled apart the rope more, this time trying about twenty. After fruitlessly pulling the rope back and forth for an hour, he gave up. This rope was sturdy, but it wasn’t doing anything to the bars.
Jere lowered the thread count back to ten, thinking he had jumped up too high. The threads held together, but Jere felt resistance as he tugged against the bars. The screamers, already irritated with his movements, lunged their arms again through the cage doors. Something was scraping against their eardrums. Jere kept pulling back and forth with the string. After about ten minutes, the thread finally snapped, but when Jere checked the bar it had cut through about a tenth of the way. He prepared yet another ten-strand rope, and went back to filing, taking his time.
After several hours of steady filing, the thread flew back at him. It took all his strength and ingenuity for the day, but he had sawed through the iron bar.
“One down, eight to go.” Jere thought. He allowed himself a few drops from his water pouch. He was immensely hungry and still thirsty, but he still needed to keep his strength.
Jere wasn’t sure if he could even use the exit, but so far no guards had come for him. The screams drowned out the sound of his sawing. If he could get through the iron bars, the wood panel past them would be easy to push out. Then it would just be a matter of waiting for nightfall, and whether he could run to safety. He had no idea where he could go after that, but he had plenty of time to think about it.
Jere set his rope aside. He once again pressed his hands over his ears, but he no longer returned to his fetal position. He sat cross-legged under the window where he would work for the foreseeable future. He closed his eyes and began to meditate.