[3rd] Week 333: Prisoner

[Rob]

Prisoner
1060 words

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Takes places after:
Confessions of the Soul​

She was still drowning in the tears of others, of people she’d never even met before, and she was still hanging from the chains that kept her person hanging between the light of life, and the dark of death. She didn’t know any of these people, didn’t remember any of the memories they showed her, but how could she... they weren’t hers to begin with. Some of the faces she remembered, from little picture-frames near their graves, but most didn’t even have that going for them.

She wanted to feel bad for them, for all of them, but the weight of their tears made her feel numb beyond her ability to care. All she could care for now was her own health, her own mental and bodily state. Mikhael, the father of all her demonic nightmares, had brought her to this state. She could still remember his contours vividly, but she often wished she couldn’t. His skin as black as the abyss he had come from, his eyes an odd mixture of white and red, spiralling against the tide towards his irises that weren’t there.

Everytime she had gazed into them, she felt like throwing up, felt like a part of her died inside. His body was distorted, and every time he’d come to visit her he’d looked differently. The first time, he still looked kind of human at that point, she didn’t know what to do, how to react. The second time, his arms and legs had begun to twist and turn and take on all sorts of weird form. At one point his entire body seemed to bend like a crescent moon, and it was then that Lina knew it was too much for her to take in.

She’d always prided herself on having a strong body, on being able to withstand even the grossest of things without much problem, but this...? This was too much, even for her. Or maybe, just maybe, it was because of the state she was in now. Dead, but still very much alive. Alive, but morbidly deceased. She’d attempted to raid Mikhael’s tomb, and had paid the ultimate price. She wondered if he’d ever let her go but, as the sounds of restless ghost wailing in the distance became louder with each passing second, the young bronze-skinned gravedigger found that notion to be very unlikely.

The hairs on her arms and head felt like they had been scorched as Lina remained motionless, waiting for the voices to creep ever so closer to her and to eventually catch up with her. She wanted to scream, and shout, and to let it all out, but she found herself unable to even open her mouth to make a noise. She looked up, but all she could perceive was the darkness of the abyss around her. She tried looking down, and to her surprise she could see her image reflected in an unknown, liquid substance. Water, perhaps?

When her eyes began to focus in on her reflection, finally getting used to the sudden source of light in this void of dark, she flinched at the sight of her face, body and arms. She looked gaunt, with large bags under her eyes - eyes that were once a proud, feral gold, now reduced to a somber, matte yellow. What struck her as worse, though, was her mouth. It had been sewn shut.

“Do you like your new look?” Mikhael’s voice called out from behind her, and it was clear from the way he intoned his words that he was really enjoying seeing Lina suffer like that. Her arms had begun to show serious signs of a beating, with large cuts and bruises all over them. The worst of it, though, was not too be seen. After all, the worst was created by the shackles that kept her in place, in his charge.

He smiled maliciously, and Lina’s eyes widened with shock in retaliation. He was wearing her smile, her mouth! It looked sickening, Mikhael looked sickening, with his... no, her mouth plastered unceremoniously along the side of his black face. Or, well, now it was! When he’d smiled at her, he’d worn her mouth on the front of his face, but now that he had returned to his own manner of speaking, he’d tossed it to the side.

Feeling the non-threatening death stare from Lina, Mikhael shrugged and let out a soft sigh.

“Are you that disgusted by your own body, Little Gravedigger?” he asked, almost in a lecturing and condescending tone of voice. “I just took it as payment for what you did to my grave, you know?

“You took something that was mine, and so I took something that was yours. It’s only natural, isn’t it?”

Shaking her head vehemently, the bronze-skinned princess tried her hardest to speak up, to tell the man who had brought her to this hell of a limbo to shut the fuck up and give her her mouth back. She tried to do all of this, but could only watch as Mikhael swapped mouths again and gave her a good laugh in her face.

“I’m impressed you know,” he continued, acting like Lina had any means of talking back to him, “you’re one of the few, if not the only person I’ve ever punished that made it this far into their punishment. Most would’ve died, or... well, disappeared by now. And with that, I obviously mean I’ve had the chance to absorb them by now.

“You’re damn well annoying with your atrocious willpower, but... I am a patient man.”

If Lina had the ability to speak, she would’ve told him that he wasn’t a man at all but, alas, such was not the case. She could only continue hanging there, feeling the ice-cold hands of the ghosts who’d been wailing in the distance finally feeling her up. With every touch, she clenched her non-existent teeth and blinked violently as tears ran down her cheeks. They showed her images she did not want to know even existed, but all she could do was try and endure them.

Endure them until it was her time. She would get out of here, she would earn her freedom again, whether voluntarily... or involuntarily. But, until then, she would remain there hanging in the void of night as a prisoner of Mikhael.