Page 14 of Escape from the Green

My stomach sank each time I would hear a guard call out to him.

Draca.

Like a slur, like an insult.

The beatings always followed.

Daily.

More often even, I imagined.

I tried, here and there, to interrupt it, to get the guards to go do something else, to save him what little bit of pain I could.

But I wasn't naive.

I knew he went to bed bloodied and bruised more nights than he didn't.

I knew he knew more about pain than I ever would.

My heart ached for his reality.

"I'm sorry for what they did to you. For what my father did to you," I told him, voice getting a little thick.

To that, his eyes - along with his body - softened, the guards fell. "You're not responsible for the crimes of your father."

Crimes.

I had never heard it called such.

Even if that was what it was.

A crime.

To beat, to enslave, to torture.

It wasn't generally seen as such in our realm.

Maybe the word, the idea, came from his clan. Maybe they were not violent as one would think creatures made of scales with the breath of fire within them would be.

Maybe they were kind and peaceful.

"I wish I could have stopped them."

"You certainly tried," he surprised me by saying. My brows had drawn low, and a slow smile tugged at his lips. "Come now, Amy. In what world did you have an emergent need for them to come and move your armoire around in your room?" he asked, reminding me of one of my less inventive attempts at distracting them. "I'll never forget that," he added, shaking his head. "You were all of a babe, half leaning out your bedroom window, voice cold as your mother's - which I knew not to be your own - informing them that they had forgotten their agreement to come up and move it, and that you were going to go tell your father if they did not do so immediately."

"I never did ask them to do it in the first place," I informed him, shrugging. "But they couldn't be accused of being the brightest bunch. They all figured they'd forgotten. I ended up living with the armoire half-blocking my closet for that year."

His smile pulled up higher at that. "You always tried, Amy. I saw that. But you were young. Your father was dead inside. There was nothing you could do to save me from it all. Well, until now that is," he added. "I barely remembered what it felt like not to have chains eating away at your flesh, burning the skin away day after day, night after night. I feel lighter," he added, shaking his head at himself as though he were being silly.

"I couldn't even lift them. I don't know how you managed to carry that weight for... I don't even know how long you were there."

Time was hard for me with my life in two different worlds. I knew Drake had been there for as long as I had been alive. Likely longer. But how long that was in Green years, I wasn't sure.

Drake let out a sound that was a laugh, but humorless. "I don't know either," he admitted. "There has been no way to gauge the passing of time. I lost track of the seasons at the beginning, when my body wasn't used to the unyielding heat, cold, work, beatings. I don't know how many summers had passed me by without taking note of them. It's been a long time, though."

In our time, a 'long time' could mean hundreds of years.

Hundreds of years of torment, of misery.