In the Pit (pt 6, final)

It had been days since either archer or hauler made appearance, or that he had been made to engage. Days without parcel or ampule. Of silvered eyes watching him from ghouling faces.

In spite of thorough depletion, the years of daily contest had him primed for violence. He shook with anxiety. In combat’s stead he took to smashing attacks into his confines, and his own body.

In the frigid midst of a third sleepless twilight, while scraping a gnarl of bone over vital flesh, he heard the slinking chatter of metal on stone. He opened his eyes but he did not move, only observed. No sound. No movement. With honed stealth he rose and approached.

He looked up the chain’s length and around the pit’s maw, which seemed somehow to have captured the cosmos with toothless jaws. The sides of the cell provided unfamiliar certainty underfoot as he prepared to ascend. He did so in anguish, grip weary, wounds tearing and weeping.

Then the sky opened. A vault of rich darkness which must have been like looking up from an ocean’s depths. He witnessed as the universe grew until the pit was a blemish beneath its twinkling expanse.

An endless landscape, pale like a corpse, stretched out until it met this, creating a level horizon which fluttered only slightly as though reflecting some weak cosmic pulse. The air moved across him, embracing him like nothing he could remember, and he drank in the stars.

The terrain was saturated by an ethereal glow, reducing all elements to a stark contrast between ghostly washes and the voids they could not reach. He understood why he saw no torches. Even the witching hour provided a lurid vision of its own.

The ground beneath was as the wall, solid and gritty. Wisps of unsoiled grain milled under his feet, making a dry crunch which strangely comforted him.

Near his pit was a short column, flared dramatically at its base and domed by regular use of the pulley mounted at its apex. Though moored to the pillar, the chain was knotted to prevent its full length sliding loudly. A track described where the anchor had been moved over the years.

The land was dotted with dozens of circles like the one he just escaped, each with an anchor casting a shadow like a moth. From his limited perspective he began to see that together the pits formed a serpentine trail rising toward the horizon, following some unseen geology along a shallow slope.

His pit was near to the end of the trail. Towers had been erected at intervals, leaving nothing unobserved. He remembered himself and ducked behind the anchor, craning to continue scanning.

Only a handful of pits had an audience of one or two animated smudges moving against the moonwashed canvas. Surely archers and haulers at task.

The holes nearer to him, at the end of the trail, were smaller and above these were erected monstrous contraptions. Beams intersected at leveraging angles to prop up a vertical shaft, which reached down into the hole, presumably along the wall. As he watched, those machines seemed to creep along the pit’s edge.

Glancing all around he saw no inviting landmarks. He felt the urge to flee but did not know to where, or if he would escape only to succumb to thirst and exposure. It was impossible to judge distance in such parched light. He resolved to make for a hill on the horizon, not knowing how far it would be or if he could conceal his flight.

He spotted movement. Barely visible, like a living shade, crawling along the ground away from him toward the next pit nearest the trail’s end. The shade approached the anchor, tied the chain and dropped it.

A cluster of birds, inkblots stealing through his periphery, arced across the night. Rising to a majestic peak and gliding weightless before turning back to the earth. Descending on an increasing trajectory. Faster, keen on a meal. Coming to rest in the figure.

He heard the cry of death, then faced back down the serpent trail. Two more shades appeared and were so felled with morbid elegance. Their banshee cries fled past him to forever wander.

Visage fading, lips parted in silence, he gave name to the futility of hope. He did not see the archer, wearing a broad smile, trained upon his heart. He only felt the unforgiving hands which returned him, tumbling, to the pit.