On The Edge of a Blade

Chapter 17

     Rose awoke to a sudden sharp noise. She sat up with a start, her bright eyes opening to reveal a swimming pool of nightmares. Dreams and reality molded together for an agonizing stretch of time, creating an amalgamation of horror. Slowly, as she gathered her bearings, the terror melted down to a manageable knot within her stomach. Once her heart rate had reached a more manageable level, Rose leaned shakily back against the cold wall once more, vainly trying to locate the danger's source.

Of course, there was nothing to see thanks to the heavy curtain of darkness surrounding her. For all she knew, the sound had simply been made by a phantom, an imaginary clamor created for her alone to hear and to fear. In a place where the subconscious and conscious melted together while a person engaged in restless, anxiety-ridden sleep, it wouldn't surprise her to find that she had come awake to a false alarm.

Once she had gathered her nerves once more, Rose stood with the help of the dungeon wall, ignoring the fact that her hands were met with a sickeningly moist and slimy texture atop the sandstone. If rocks and minerals could cry, then she was certain that this was exactly how it'd feel.

Rose began pacing about her small dungeon cage, stretching her legs and reawakening her mind. In the meantime, she tried to decipher how much time had passed. She knew that it was the middle of the night when she and James had been discarded here like yesterday's garbage, but it didn't help that she had fallen asleep. Truth be told, she hadn't even realized that she'd drifted off; James had fallen silent, she had nestled up to ride out the storm, and then . . . .

At any rate, time had passed. She couldn't keep track of said time, but at least some progression had been made.

Falling into a rhythm, Rose continued to walk back and forth through her allotted space. She fretted for a while before falling into a state of insufferable impatience, then at last came to a state where her mind was elsewhere completely. If this was to be a waiting game, then so be it. It certainly wouldn't break her.

A more pressing concern than fighting boredom was hunger. It started to make its appearance slowly, but within an hour that small annoyance turned into a nearly insufferable pain. Luckily, Rose had been trained to deal with things such as hunger, Liana knowing full well that it was imperative to fight and win against the whims of the stomach. Eventually starvation could become a concern, of course, but not now. The truly pressing worry that burdened her was hydration. She had successfully gone days without eating, but water was something that she absolutely needed. A dry mind had impaired thinking, and a dry tongue tended to lose its restraints.

Finally, she reached a point where she just needed to speak. Regardless of whether or not James wanted to talk to her, she needed to talk to him. "James?"

For a long, agonizing moment, Rose wasn't certain if he was going to respond or not. It got to the point where she wondered if he was there at all. Finally, as she was in the process of opening her mouth to whisper his name again, he answered. "What?"

A breath of air escaped her mouth. Though relieved that she wasn't alone, there was no way in Hell that she was going to comment on that ease of her mind. "Did you fall asleep."

"Slept like a baby. Why'd you wake me up?"

". . . I'll take that as a no. How long has it been?"

"I don't know." In those three simple syllables, James expressed a detering harshness that would have seemed out of character even a day previous. Something about the atmosphere in the dungeon could alter a person, but his transformation was happening rather rapidly. "Let me just check my sundial real quick, or maybe trace the stars in the sky to figure out the approximate hour." There was a heavily implied eye roll in his sarcasm.