Radiance and Shadows

Nine months later, Well of Dragons; Eight

The young tiefling awoke from her slumber with a deafening crash against her metal cell door. She sat to her elbows in alarm, remembering again where she was. It was always a sad reminder when she was roused.

Three and a half months it had been.

Ripped from her family and thrown into a cult prison that she didn't even know existed. She looked down at the shackles on her wrists and ankles, chained to the stone wall of the dark cell she was in. Her bed was nothing more than a metal table with a thin blanket.

She hadn't seen the sun in weeks.

Light flickered only from lanterns hung throughout the underground prison, guards patrolling the corridors. She got to eat once a day, and was released whenever they required her to labor. The toilet consisted of a deep hole in the floor in the far corner.

Her last few months had consisted of digging new tunnels with other captives, watching slowly as all of them withered away, malnourished, overworked, and underfed.

She stood up, smoothing back her long hair, binding it in a messy bun between her rear-facing, upturned horns. A simple leather band to tie up her crimson hair was all the kindness she'd been shown here. She was lucky; many of the captives had their hair raggedly cut short with any blade lying around.

The young female's skin was a light red, made even lighter by her lack of sun. She possessed milky golden eyes that shone in the dark, progressively losing their will to continue. She stood on a frail frame, deteriorating. Her tail had become whip-like and wire thin, the pointed isoscele on the end of it faded and pale. Her horns were straight, angled from her eyebrows, around the side of her head, and towards the peak of the back of her skull. They had lost their pinkish-red tint with malnourishment.

And yet even among tieflings, she was gorgeous.

Her cell door opened abruptly, the same large, dark skinned man as always coming to free her of her chains and lead her to wherever it was this time.

Neither of them said a word. He opened her bindings and pushed her out of the cell and down the corridor. Every single day, she had the same routine.

She was tired.

She was dying.

The warden pushed her along the tunnel, cut raggedly from the earth.

The girl thought of home, as she always did about now, and of what it was like there. The infernal bindings of her family's race left people wary, but the girl was blessed with a sweet voice, uncharacteristic of her species, that was often very disarming. She shared that trait with her sister.

Her sister.

Her mind wandered further, endlessly wondering where her only sibling had been dragged to. Her parents had been carried off when the cultists had arrived, and as someone with hardly any combat training, she was fairly useless against her captors; she knew no magic, wasn't deft with a blade, and hadn't even play wrestled in her youth. She was an oddity among her race, and it often left her feeling frail and worthless.

Her sister was always opposite, but the two of them had somehow managed to fit together like puzzle pieces, regardless. Her sister was fiery and hotheaded, but highly intelligent and problem solving, though, usually that came into play after she'd already dove in and cauzed a mess.

The girl had put up a hell of a fight, but the reality was that she was weak and a rookie with a blade. There wasn't much she could do except thrash.

The tiefling remembered vividly how she had screamed out as a cultist struck her sister, incapacitating her. She remembered watching them get dragged apart, barely conscious, and thrown into moving wagons.

"..Kira.." she whispered, echoing her sister's name more in her mind than in her throat.

The cultist paid her no mind, shoving a pickaxe into her arms and pointing at the wall ahead.

"You may begin." He said, turning and leaving her alone. The rhythmic tick of the axe on the stone filled her ears. Endless, endless.

Her arms strained, her face already wet with tears. She wanted to stop, but she didn't want to die for it. Telling the cultist to shove it would only delay the inevitability that the work would be done. Even if she resisted and died, someone else would simply pay the price for it. 

There was no escape for her. Not yesterday, not today, and probably not tomorrow. She had accepted long ago that she was going to die here and be thrown out back with the rest of the corpses, fed to the drakes the cult had created from old dragon bones.

She shuddered. Drakes. She had seen them only a few times.. wingless dragon creations of a much smaller size. They made up a majority of the cult's forces, and they relied heavily on their ferocity to win against people like her family, and others. 

She only ever got bits and pieces of information floating around, but she remembered distinctly hearing the screams of those who refused to work being fed to the beasts. Her and her previous cellmate, Elle, had both sat awake, fearful. 

She missed that older woman. As soon as the tiefling had seen her, she knew the woman wouldn't last long. In her time here, though, she'd given the young tiefling a lot to hope for. Escape, a better life. Miracles, even. When the woman finally died from the workload, she had smiled in death and left the tiefling with her blessing. 

Once Elle had died, the tiefling had spoken to so infrequently she almost had forgotten her own name.

Zina.

She had scratched it on the wall of her cell in her second week, glancing occasionally at the letters if only to remember who she was. She had surrounded the word with scratches to count the days she'd been here.

She wasn't even sure if each day was actually a day; with no sun, she didn't know if she'd been sleeping for an hour or a week, but the rhythmic workload was enough to keep a schedule.

When the time came, her warden pulled her from the wall, putting another captive in her place to carry away the stone she had cleared. Zina was led back to her cell, a pitiful tray of food left on her metal bed. She ate it all, stale bread, expired cheese, and a half glass of water, knowing that it could be all she got for a few days.

The fact that anyone remembered to feed her at all was saddening and surprising.

She sat her tray by the door, laying down and letting the warden replace her shackles.

She sighed, idly reaching over and adding a scratch to the wall as the man left her to rest.

109 days.

She closed her eyes, forcing herself not to hope for death to spare her, and to keep her from the 110 mark.

Her mind fell idle, and she drifted into sleep.