Drip, drip, drip. . .

Lilla had lost count of how many days they had held her now. But that drip, drip, drip had never ceased. On it went, day or night, although she could tell the passing of neither. Drip, drip, drip – loud as screaming, each one a needlepoint in her ear.

She screwed her eyes shut and opened them again. The same darkness, black as death. Shadow deep as the ocean.

Sight was gone. But her other senses had become sharp as blades. The taste of the air, dank and stale; the reek of something foul, creeping in through a small grate in the door which she had glimpsed when they brought her here. Her wrists rubbed raw with her shackles, sending sharp throbbing pulses to her brain; her naked toes numb with the cold, but smeared with the filth that slicked the damp stones of her cell.

No one had come for her.

In the beginning she was outraged – to be treated like a criminal, arrested and marched through the palace with servants and nobles alike staring at her like some common thief. But the sentinels were deaf to her demands. And as they walked her down into hidden depths under the palace deeper than she could ever have imagined, her demands became first pleas, then entreaties. Looking back, she was ashamed how she had demeaned herself, when it was obvious that the sentinels answered to a higher authority than her, and cared not a fig what she wanted. They told her nothing – not even the charge under which she was held. Only that she would be held indefinitely. . . with no assurance even that one day someone would come with an explanation.

Darkness. Her whole world was darkness. The future, the present, the past.

At times, she wondered whether she was even conscious, or else trapped in some nightmare of past suffering. She remembered only too well the darkness of Niflagard, the cold, the stirring echoes that haunted her with untold horrors waiting just beyond her ken. . . But, she told herself, the Nefelung were monstrous, their lord a devil of Hel. Here, she had thought, she was amongst civilized men. Or at least men.

But no. All the while that she had dwelled in the airy halls above, below lurked foul darkness. And she had a sickening, soaring vision: that this Great City, this beating heart of all the world, was diseased, was rotting from its roots. That within even the very best of the world of men, dark wickedness lay hidden.

Sometimes the shadows were shattered by the shrieks of human voices, from other poor wretches chained in those murky depths whose cries came ringing through her head, waking her from her half-consciousness. And then silence. . . silence for so long that she wondered if those screams, too, were of her own mind’s making.

Drip, drip, drip. . .

And still no one came.