Page 125 of Somno Slave
Torches burn low against the walls. Their light flickers over illegible scriptures carved into the stone, deep grooves filled with soot and moisture. Letters that have decayed over time.
Something moves.
Deogal.
The realisation hits me with a punch.
He’s on his knees, chains biting into his wrists, shoulders folded inward. His breath comes jagged, like he’s trying to swallow air that breathes itself. His spine juts beneath thin fabric. He looks... emptied.
“They starved me.” Someone is next to me.
I turn so sharply my hand flies to my throat.
He stands beside me, too, the version of him I recognise, older, angrier.
“For months.” He murmurs, voice more like gravel than honey now. “Maybe years. I had no concept of time down there.”
The bars open, a deep groan of metal against stone echoing around the room.
Three men enter without hurry, hoods up high, their orange robes dragging across the stone with a soft, deliberate whisper that makes my skin crawl. The hems swallow their feet entirely, and for one sickening moment it looks as though they are not walking at all, but gliding—silent, unnatural, drifting toward the centre of the room like something summoned rather than human.
The light catches them badly. Their faces exist only in fragments; the sharp edge of a cheekbone, the hollow beneath an eye, the brief glint of skin before shadow takes it back. I can’t make out their features properly, only the shape of them, and somehow that is worse. My body reacts before my mind does, every instinct recoiling, something deep inside me staggering backwards like distance itself might save me.
A fourth man lingers behind them, slower, letting the others move first.
“The Friars.” I hear Deogal’s voice in the back of my mind, low and quiet. “Holy men.”
It’s only now that I recognise, they’re each carrying something different. The first carries a wooden bucket, water sloshing softly against the sides with each step, the sound small and intimate in the silence. The second holds a length of cloth draped over both hands. It hangs heavy, stained dark at the edges, damp enough that I can smell it from here—old water, mildew, something metallic underneath that my mind refuses to name. The third presses a book flat against his chest like scripture, fingers wrapped so tightly around the spine his knuckles blanch white, as though if he lets go of it, something terrible will happen.
But it is the fourth that makes the room change.
He carries nothing.
His hands hang empty at his sides, calm and still, and somehow that terrifies me most of all. The others look like preparation, ritual, he looks like the reason for it.
He stops a few feet from me, close enough that the air feels thinner, as though even the room is holding its breath for him.
For a moment, he says nothing. His head remains bowed beneath the hood, the fabric casting him in deeper shadow. I find myself staring at his hands, at the stillness of them, at the terrible patience in the way he stands there.
Then, slowly, he lifts one hand.
The movement is unhurried, almost reverent, fingers catching the edge of the hood with the kind of care that makes my stomach twist. The fabric drags softly as he pushes it back, inch by inch.
First, the line of his mouth appears—too calm, too composed. Then the sharp cut of his jaw, pale beneath the torchlight, the shadow of hollows beneath his cheekbones.
When the hood finally falls back, the sound of it settling against his shoulders is louder than it should be. There’s a bold shine on the cap of his head, a ring of hair wrapping in a circle below it.
His pale eyes fix onto Deogal.
“Well,” he says, voice hoarse. “Look at you. Still here.”
Deogal lifts his head slowly, as though the effort alone costs him something. Fear fractures across his features like cracked glass.
“Please,” he whispers. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him plead. It hits me in the chest like a blunt object.
“Let me go.” His lips tremble once. “I’ve got nothing to offer you.”
The Friar crouches slowly, robes folding around him like a blanket.
