9th Day of Fall, 516AV || Whiplash Plantation, East of Kenash
The slave didn't know how he'd managed to last the night. He knew it was no sign of favor, of that he was sure. Under a canopy of beautiful stars, wonderful and eternal, he had spend bells wrapped in terror. No sleep came to him, for he dared none. All he had to do was let his head nod for a moment to his chin, let his legs go slack under him, and the vision of jackals and vultures and lizards gnawing at his snoring form would slap him around the face and-
Metallus would wake, after barely a moment. A moment in the world and a whole night of terror in his mind. Blink at the stars, at the sky that worked ebon to jasmine to pale and paling with each breath. Feel his heart shudder and tremble in every vein, fit to rattle the chains binding his wrists and ankles.
He wanted to die. It would have been the smart thing to do. Nothing would save him. Three attempts at escape, and the lash and branding iron and the tiny metal sweat box hadn't been enough to break him. The fourth time... well...
There was never a fifth.
He wanted to die, but his soul would not allow it. He wanted to bow his head and let sleep and terror claim him until his lungs didn't breath and his heart wouldn't pump. He wanted so badly for this to end, for all of it, his whole wasted life... but at the edge of the cliff, the raw and primal part of his being would not let him. Every tick he breathed was life, was hope, was-
Metallus sighed into the moist morning air. Gods, he was so dry. Not just thirsty or hot, but dried, like he'd been smoked over a fire. All afternoon and evening in the unrelenting gaze of Syna, with no draught to quench himself. He wondered if that was the point of this simple punishment: that we would simply die of thirst and exposure. Chained up and left to expire, then beyond that, rot away until his bleached bones finally slipped their bones and were carried away by the scavengers along with the meat in their bellies. No tombstone for him save the pole they'd chained him to.
Bare feet crunched softly on soil and gravel. Low voices. Murmurs. Even the hint of slave songs, old as the city itself, raising from a hushed spatter of accents. Metallus squinted and licked lips like sandpaper. All he could see were shambling blobs between the bruising purple that was everywhere else in the field. Black and white and pink and tanned and all of them coming with the clank of chains.
The bark of orders. The hiss and bark of whips and chains. Hooves clopping across the ground as the overseers circled and strutted down the ranks of indigo and glowered at their charges.
The doomed human felt his head slump again. No. A slow death was not their intent, or at least, not the prime concern. They could have whipped him to death yesterday before all and sundry and been done with it. No... they wanted something worse for him. That he not only die but die among his friends, men and women and children he had laughed and ate and sang and cried and loved with. He could feel them moving around him. Disturbing the shrubs of indigo. Unfurling sacks to collect the precious plant.
He murmured. Water. Barely even a word, but made plain as a scream by his condition. Water, please, just a dram. A taste. Anything... but no-one listened. No-one looked. He was already a ghost in that fiend and fury gave him legs again, rose him up that he would die like this, doomed by bastards and ignored by cretins and no, no he would scream out his last breaths even if it-
THUNK!
Something fast as a whistle on the breeze slammed into the pole above his head and immediately Metallus ducked... or didn't, thanks to the chains. All defiance fled, all rage was squashed and snuffed in a moment when he saw someone stand at the edge of the field. It rose from the purple rows like a monster from a demented sea, broad-brimmed hat making his head to wide and tall like a hammerhead shark.
"Shyke."
The voice carried, even across the hundred feet or so of chirping insects and sweating slaves. Mayhap it wasn't the voice itself, but the nature of it. So casual, despite its disappointment... because it was disappointed, and nothing more. The fact he was shooting at a man, naked and terrified and chained to a pole, meant nothing to the bearer of that voice. He was just upset about his shot.
Metallus' vision swam, even through the fear that madde it sharp. It wavered so it looked like the tall man had taken off his head and was fanning his stump with it... no, that was his hat. It must have been.
Creaking wood. Straining strings. He dared to glance up, strain his eyes upward so they burned in his sockets. He looked at the crossbow bolt and then back at the man who had that heavy contraption in his hands now, yanking back on the string with both hands... sliding a fresh bolt into the groove...
The scarred man. He knew him now. That hat and that voice, like steel dragged through gravel. The one who smoked that same Swamp Vision tobacco he could smell wafting over to him, smoldering in the man's pipe at that moment.
Venger. They called him Venger.
"Out of practice," the man himself mumbled as he shouldered the crossbow and aimed the top of the bolt at the slave's bicep. "Bloody pathetic..."
