And now, once the sun rises, we face death. Worse than death, some of us will be forced to watch as the others are torn to pieces, as noctis devour the only people I have left in the realm.
The thought has my hands trembling like the last crispy leaves dangling precariously from branches at the start of a blustery winter.
The only thing that’s been able to soothe me are the songs my mother would sing. Trapped down here in these cells, I can hum their tunes freely without fear of ghouls or noctis hearing me. It’s ironic, really. For years I fought the urge to let her songs live through me because uttering a single note would mean my death, but now here, in the early morning hours of the day I die, I can finally breathe life into her songs.
And the one I hear her singing in my thoughts most often is the same one she was humming the morning I left her in her garden so I could find Rowland and Agnes:
Leaves and sprigs
Herbs and twigs
Let them grow, grow, grow
Let them grow, grow, grow
In dirt, I dig
With water, seeds swig
Let life flow, flow, flow
Let life flow, flow, flow
Asomber chuckle from the cell beside ours makes me jump.
“You sound just like her, you know?”
I glance over to find Rowland propped up on one of his arms, his shirt discarded beside him.
I avert my gaze from his rippling muscles before my treacherous eyes can betray me.
“I know,” I tell him, my heart pinching.
Suddenly, the dungeon door heaves open. A loud, cavernous sound gnaws its way through the dark corridors, and I feel the jaws of death pressing down around us, the sharp teeth of fear puncturing my lungs.
Beside me, Elison and Mira stir, sleepy-eyed and unperturbed for the handful of blinks it takes them to remember what’s coming for us today. Then Mira's eyes fill with tears. Elison's hands clutch the belly that she will never get to see grow.
In the cell next to ours, Rowland is scrambling to get his shirt on while his cellmates start to rouse. When our lines of sight catch there’s an apology and a promise warring within the shadows of his eyes.
He wishes he could’ve saved us.
He still plans to try.
Not knowing what he’s up to, I focus instead on the noctis scurrying into the dungeon like spiders. Even the shuffling of their feet against the hard stone floor makes my skin crawl as if a thousand ants are writhing beneath it.
There are plenty of cells to stop at—at least ten, maybe more. But as luck would have it, they come before Rowland's first. Once they have the door unlocked, noctis barge into his cell by the dozen.
"What's going on?" Lewis barks in the face of the two cornering him.
He's not the only one to show his frantic frustration. As noctis surround the male prisoners, outnumbering them two-to-oneat a minimum, and in some cases more, the men become alive. They yell. They fight. They scream and kick. It’s the most action I’ve seen from any of them since my arrival and I almost want to scream at them for waiting for so long. But for some, there is no better time to fight than when death has finally come.
It’s almost inspiring, especially to see them working together. Not all of them, of course. Most are too stunned or depressed by their imminent demise to be able to do much of anything but flail. But there are a few who stand with their backs together, fists raised.
For the briefest of moments, I actually feel hope.
They might outnumber us, but maybe we can fight back? Maybe that's been our problem all along. Humankind has been too content with kowtowing, with being shoved to underground communities and remote villages disguised as ghost towns instead of taking action.
Rowland, is of course, among those rallying. The man behind him, his face is unrecognizable to me, looks like the kind of man anyone would trust having at their back. He has an honest face, an abled body. But most of all, it's his eyes. They tell a story of a lifetime of pain that he's tired of running from. They show a man who's ready to fight and reclaim what he’s owed.
