Devil in the Dark

The monster in the corner of the jail cell wasn't moving. It's eyes were two emotionless silver flecks in a blanket of shadow. Scary and silent. Hollowed and haunted. Ancient beyond words. The rest was hard to make out in the darkness. The creature was definitely large and twisted. It appeared to have wings which were scaled. It's face seeming animalistic, but strangely human.

Anna Isabel Asau had been down here for days. Possibly weeks. Possibly longer. It was all a blur now. She wasn't sure how much more she could take before she completely lost control of reality. Before what was left of her sanity was gone forever.

Her long dark hair was matted, and frayed like a wild woman. In a way she was a wild woman now. Everything had been taken from her. Her palace, her family, her kingdom: all gone. All that was left was this disconnected reality of being locked away in the dark, and the unmoving creature in the corner.

And of course her crown; her reminder of what life had been, and who she once was. This had been left with her, and she wore it now. A cruel joke to torture herself in the darkness of her jail cell.

The monster was continuously becoming more realized over the time she had been locked in here. At first all she had seen where treacherous eyes murmuring in the dark. Then the diabolical face. Then the wings, and the twisted arms. It never said a thing, and never moved at all. It just watched, and waited. A patient monster. A devil in the dark born from the slipping of time, and from the internal destruction of reality. From the slow but steady loss of control. From the fading of sanity.

Anna prayed for sound. For Pain. For something. For anything.

But only that terrible silence lingered. She was forgotten down here. Broken of soul, and useless to the world. She had no place up there anymore. It was all gone. Burnt to the ground. Forever lost.

She heard whispering, and then realized suddenly that she was talking to herself. What was she saying? At first it seemed like gibberish. She felt as if she had never spoken before. As if it were an impossible thing that just now became possible.

She realized she was talking to the monster.

"You're ugly," she said. "You're everything that I never was, and wish I could be. Strong, patient, observant."

Silence lingered.

"If I had been you, I never would have ended up down here."

Anna felt as if she had no purpose anymore. It was a terribly feeling. Uselessness, was there anything worse? To be unseen and forgotten. To be so alone. There was a strange freedom to it–but it was also suffocating. A raw unsettling helplessness.

She tried imagining better days, but the darkness in her thoughts snuffed out any attempts of hope. There was also something else in her mind and in her heart. Something so distant and so feint that it almost wasn't there.

A dull, tired anger.

Black coals burning low beneath her current circumstances. It was quite possibly the only thing keeping her alive at this moment. She had no use for it really. There was nothing to be done anymore. But it was still there just the same.

How long has it been since she had eaten? There had been times blurred within the time spent in this darkness that scraps had been pushed through a slot in the jail cell door. She had no way of knowing who or what was pushing the food and water through. It was most likely one of the guards or soldiers ordered to keep her alive, but she had no real way of knowing. They never said a thing. The silence was another form of torture she supposed.

The loneliness was becoming so overwhelming that she was having a hard time breathing. She wanted to gag, but forced herself not to. She wanted to die.