“Arn?” asked the soft, feminine voice of a friendly moth. It flitted through the kaleidoscope dreamworld like an alien—a small, lost thread of reality.
Arn was busy climbing the cliff of bones. His face was bleeding freshly, as though this was the cliff of Scoa, but this cliff was populated by the bones and rotted faces of the populace of Razaad. Arn had betrayed them, according to the strong, stoic man—the one that had always been there in the dreamworld. Arn had sold them out to his captors in exchange for a brief respite from the pain. With his bloody face, Arn had told the strong man that it was worth it.
“Arn,” came the tendril of reality. It hovered about Arn’s face, distracting him from his sister’s skull. “Wake up.”
Arn rose out the dreamworld groggily. He saw Gamden, lounging against the bars of their metal cell—a cell illuminated by torch light on the one side and by the ever-expanding fiery presence at the other end of the cell. Arn pushed himself off the bars and rubbed the patchy whiskers of his malnourished chin.
A woman was standing on the other side of his bars. She wore a sweat-stained dress and her frizzled brown hair was tucked hastily into a clasp. “I thought he was lying…I thought he sent me down here as a trap.”
It was Massema. Arn returned to the bars, peering through at her. Somehow, he noticed the bruise on her forearm first—and then he saw the angry layer of yellow, purple, and red on her cheek. She had been beaten. “What happened to you?” Arn asked, quietly.
She lowered her face. “I’m fine,” she said. “Alive, which is more than some can say.”
Arn pursed his lips. He glanced at Gamden. He was missing part of his thumb—just as Arn was missing part of his face. Perhaps physical damage was a sign of the mental damage that plagued Arn’s perceptions.
“You still see him?” Massema asked.
Arn flinched and looked back at her—if she was even there. She, who had always told him to focus. She, who had done what no others had ever done…she had convinced him to hope again.
“He’s not real, Arn. Drowen is—Crar was. Try to pay attention to…”
The caged madman slowly sank down again, lowering his back against the wall until his gaze was at height with the skirts around her thighs.
“Arn,” she whispered. “Don’t do this again.”
Arn grunted wordlessly. He looked at Gamden.
“She knows nothing about our plight. She’s not in here,” Gamden muttered. “And she wasn’t there when I made us important again. By killing Crar, I made sure they would want us—”
“You got us tortured and no less important than a prisoner in a cell, you wretched fool,” Arn cursed, glaring at Gamden. He glanced at the red-eyed face that gazed out of the fiery pool at the other end of the cell. It breathed his fury and gorged on his bitterness. Arn shivered.
Massema touched his shoulder through the bar and Arn tensed. “Focus—you did it before.”
Her gaze was thwarted by Arn’s wandering despair. Her words fell on Arn’s deaf ears. “When all was said and done,” Arn whispered, “I need them. That’s why I see them.”
“You don’t need them,” Massema pleaded. “I’ll visit you. I’ll be here for you—I’m being kept on as one of Drowen’s slaves after Quenden was killed.”
So Quenden had died…at least something good had come of Arn’s torturous revelations—he shuddered, thinking about that room where the robed man had inflicted such pain upon him.
“Did Drowen do this to you?” Arn asked, raising his fingers toward her marred face. The cursed metal ribs separated him from her.
Massema tilted her head, hesitating. “I—no. He didn’t. He told me to say he had. It was the other slaves—I’m an outsider to them.”
Arn scoffed. On Razaad, Arn never would have heeded the advice of someone who let weak slaves beat them bloody. Massema was weaker even than them. He slumped back from the bars and sank against the cold metal wall. Her continued words, full of hope and life, fell futilely against Arn’s spreading rage. The fire in the corner of the room grew an inch farther and Arn grew more anxious for what was to come.