The Pavilion was filled with people whom, Isalie had long since learned, were captives like her. There were men, women, children and, Isalie hoped and prayed, horses, all in the same situation she was. Torn from their homes, many were frightened and some were even angry. Many were crying, possibly mourning the life, family and friends they had been taken from. And some, like Isalie, were silent, contemplating what they had all now become.
The runaway slave watches some of the younger captives; some children looked to be the age that they had barely started talking, and they had been stolen from their families. Those were the worst, most wailing throughout the night, pleading for their mothers. But their captors would clearly do nothing; they had been taken for a reason and would not lightly be taken back. All other captives were so caught up in their own minds that few even thought to comfort those who needed it. For Isalie, she was feeling nothing, and had little motivation at all to move from her uncomfortable position on the ground in order to speak words she knew she didn't mean. She couldn't even empathise with them, as they had lost everything whereas Isalie had lost nothing; to the contrary, Isalie had everything to gain.
The dimming light told Isalie that night would soon be upon them, though she knew that most would not sleep much. Isalie herself had spent so much time on the run that she found it difficult to do anything but sleep lightly, and sleep for a short amount of time. Her diet had not really been able to sustain her sleeping habits and so, now that she had no where to go and nothing to do, her body was finally trying to catch up.
Having been captured by a band of men outside of Syliras, after she and Matthew had said their goodbyes, Isalie's flight instinct set in immediately. But Shadow, her horse, was weakened from his malnourishment and could not out stride the other horses. The rest of the journey passed in much of a haze for Isalie; the men had given her something to keep her docile and incapable of escaping again. But she remembers, in her semi-conscious state, the fear of thinking that slavers had finally found her and were going to return her to Falyndar.
It wasn't until a few days after her arrival here, in this... Captive's Pavilion, when the cloud covering her mind had passed, that she realises they spoke a foreign tongue to her, rather than her mother tongue of Myrian. Instant relief had flooded her in that moment, but it was short lived, before the apathy set in.
A man, one of the Drykas as Isalie had discovered their race was called, approaches and begins to hand out food. "What are we doing here?!" She tears her eyes away from the food to search out who had spoken. A woman, at least a few years older than Isalie, was standing and had apparently spoken. In a synchronised movement, all heads turn back to look at the Drykas, waiting for an answer that everyone had been thinking, but only now had asked.
In broken words, he speaks the Common tongue. The Drykas numbers had dwindled, or they had been eradicated: Isalie wasn't too sure, his explanation not being the most fluent, and her grasp also being lacking. So the Drykas people had sent out raiding parties to Syliras and the land around to bring home people to repopulate. The angry among the captives grew enraged, the upset made more noise, but there was no change for the apathetic and despondent, like Isalie. If anything, she found closure in what she had understood.
