How many days in this chamber?
I watch the thin golden sliver of sunlight move as slow as honey across the walls. Each moment an age, watch the tiny motes of dust caught in its light, dancing as innocent and ephemeral as may-flies in a summer evening. Gold gives way to silver, and the dimmer light of the moon traces time over the same tracks. The same and same and same.
Time pierced and punctuated by the arrival of his men three upon three. Three times daily ... dawn, evening and midnight, three times three men in rotation, so none may befriend me without the knowledge of the others, and it is rare that the same configuration of them appears. Nine gaolers charged with his bidding, nine men I would need to bring to my cause if I ever hope to be free.
But each man watches the others, as suspicious of his bretheren as each is suspicious of me. I see no hope of sympathy in their hard eyes - immune as they must be to the sorrow and destitution that their master brings upon others.
As each day blends seamlessly into night, and night gives way to day, the world is kept from me. Slowly the stone walls move a little closer. Inch by inch it seems, this small chamber becomes the world and my mind immured by it. How long? Will I be here for years... lifetimes of Men? Why am I held here... neither maltreated as a prisoner, nor questioned as a hostage...? The nagging uncertainty... am I to be ransomed? Am I a prize? Am I some embodied leverage in a strife I am unaware of ?
The walls stare back, mute except for my own words and answers rebounding from them, like a myriad of mirrors reflecting and scattering my own image back to me, repeating infinitely until one could be driven to dispair. Is this his purpose then, this subtle-minded Man, with his ink-black eyes unfathomable within the night-gloom of his skin - to drive me to the edge of despair - so that I reveal...what? Give what? Do what? Is this his torture - a slow unknowing, an agony brought upon myself by my own mind ?
