When You Escape Death’s House

A guard comes up and slips a tray of food into my cell. I snatched the tray. It was a small loaf of bread and a crab apple with a glass of water. I sighed as I stuff it down. It may taste like it’s been out for a week but it was better than nothing.

I watched another guard drag a little girl’s corpse through the hallways. The girl couldn’t be older than 9. She was covered in oozing cuts and her little pink dress was stained with blood. I heard a man cry out to her and scream the girl's name. I turned my head away so I was looking at the stone walls of my cell instead. I’ve seen worse over my 10 years of being here.

It still pained me to see it. 

As the man gets dragged away to be involved in who knows what, my friend Nero, a boy a little older than me who’s been here for a few years, peeked up through the bars that make us able to see each other. I scrambled to stand on my bed to see him. I and Nero look a lot alike. We have the same dark black hair and sharp jaw and dark skin, but his eyes were gray. Mine were bloodred. Besides, I saw my family die when I was 6. And there was no brother in the bloodbath.

“You look tired,” I said to Nero as I saw the dark shadows under his eyes. “Did they put you through the Dierdre?”

He shook his head. There was an odd haunted look in his sharp gray eyes. “Then why-”

Nero reached his hand through the bars and cuffed his hand around my mouth. “God Kip, shut up for a minute and listen.”

I glared at him and bit his hand. He jerked it back. I held my tongue and listened. 

“Yes sir.” Someone responded to something I didn't hear.

“When she collapses, we’ll take her to Deirdre. We’ll plug her into the plant and let it consume her.” I heard another say. I recognized that voice. It’s Carmen Watts. He is the one that chooses who has a use here and who dies. When my village was raided by their gang, they saw my blood-red eyes and knew immediately I was “special.” I was taken here and they have been extracting my powerful magic from me since.

“For how long, sir?

“However long it takes for the plant to consume her completely.”

They were going to kill me.

The Deirdre was a type of plant that consumes magic. Magic was its food source. But this place had figured out how to take away the excess magic and force it into another life form. I’ve been given this plant once a week and after a certain amount of time, they will free you from the plant and return you to your cell. If they don’t free you, then the plant sucks you from magic completely, killing the host. The extraction itself was painful and exhausting, I couldn't imagine going all the way.

This place only kept you alive if you were useful. As soon as you served your purpose, you were as good as dead.

Nero looks at me, his eyes big. “You have to get out of here,” he says.

I shook my head. I don’t know how I survived this place without Nero. He came here when I was 9 and we were almost inseparable. Literally. The only thing that prevented us from fully seeing each other was a stone wall. Other than that, he made me laugh after I came back from the Deirdre. He listened as I cried to him about my people. And he knows me better than anyone. Nero was here because he has prophecies and visions of the future when he sleeps. They are very unpredictable. Once a month the gang will take him and ask him about their future. He would have to tell him something or else someone will die. I’ve heard him cry himself to sleep as he would remember them torturing others so that he would talk.

“We are getting out of here,” I said. “I’m not leaving without you.”

He opens his mouth, but something about my expression stops him from arguing further.   

“Fine,” he snarls. “Now how do WE get out of here, Kip?”

“You suggested it! I thought you had a plan!”

“I suggested getting ONE person out, and it just flew to my mind. I didn’t have time to plan after we heard those thugs talking about your death!”

I glowered at him. Some of the consequences of our nice friendship are that we fight almost every single day. 

As I glowered, one of the bars on the slot that allows us to see each other broke in half. I’m a sorceress. That means I can perform magic without words or wands or staffs like witches and wizards. Sometimes I perform spells on accident because I'm feeling a strong emotion. 

While I kept giving him the stink eye, his frustrated expression slipped. 

“Do that again,” he says.

I’m most powerful a day or so before I go to the Deirdre because my body has time to replenish my magic. 

I concentrate on the second bar. We would be in big trouble if we got caught, but I like the thrill rushing through me. I always feel it when I perform magic.

The second bar breaks. He takes one big hand and jerks the pieces off. We were both thinking the same thing as he stared at me.

I closed my hand over my neck-shackle. It breaks and I feel the air touch that area of skin for the first time in a long time. I touched the callouses and raw spots the shackle had caused. I walk over to the lock on my door and I break that too. The door comes open. I am shaking. This is the most I had ever willingly performed magic. The magic rushed through my veins and my body welcomed it graciously.

I felt like I could do anything. I could fly.

Or get us out of here.

I ran over to Nero’s cell. It was just a stone wall with a door with metal bars at the top, but I imagined it as Nero’s room. The place he had stayed for 7 years. The place where he would think about my thoughts and I would think about him.

“Kip? Are you there?” I heard him say. His familiar face peered out the bars on the door.

“Nero, it's me! I’m going to try and bust your lock, okay?”

I bent over and touch the lock. I immediately frown. His lock was much bigger than mine and made out of steel while mine was made out of iron. It looked more complicated than mine.

I cleared my throat. “Um, Nero? Why is your lock a lot harder to break than mine?”

“They have a lot of sorcerers and sorceresses that they harvest on, it's probably not as big of a deal if they break out, just as long as they're caught. They only have 1 of me, so they don’t want me to be at risk of escaping,” he responds calmly. “You can still bust me out, right?

“Of course, I can! Just give me a few minutes.”

“We might not have a few minutes, Kip.”

“Oh stop being negative and let me concentrate.”

He grumbles a little but shuts up. I focus on the lock. I let my magic pour into the lock and move around the little gears a very complicated key would control. 

“Got it!” I whispered as I heard the lock click. 

Suddenly, someone grabbed me by the throat and threw me to the opposite dungeon wall. My head slams against the wall and I see stars. As I crumple to the floor, I look up to see who threw me. It was Carmen Watts. He was grinning an evil grin at me as if he was waiting for this day to come his whole life. Behind him, were at least 5 other guards. I scan them as I get up on my feet. None of them were sorcerers, or else they would have a deep purple Arora around them. My biggest threat was Carmen.

“Do you need to attack someone from behind to get them to the ground? Wow, Watts, you're losing your touch,” I say coolly.

His grin changed to a poker face and he growled to the guards, “Seize her.”

The guards ran at me at full speed. I flung my hands forward and felt the magic surge up inside me. An invisible force slammed into the guards. They went flying back in all different directions and slammed into a wall.

“The one time we didn't drug your food with Secordeus, you attempted to escape! It’s not going to work, little Kip.”

  Secordeus is a drug that is used so that your mind can’t think for itself too well, and making changes to the schedule is tricky. I realize how easy it was to get out until this moment. I felt a surge of white-hot anger. 

I saw Nero creeping out of his cell, opening the door quietly, but the door creaked and Watts slowly started to turn around. I had to distract him. 

I thrust one hand forward and a fireball shot out of my hand. My hand burned from the spell, but I watched as it hit his left calf. While he was screaming in pain, I saw Nero’s face peeking out of the cleaning closet. 

While everyone was distracted, I started running toward him. We needed a second to evaluate the situation. 

Suddenly, my lungs started burning, not in the way it burns when you run a lot but as if someone had set fire to them. Was it a side effect of the spell I performed?

I leaned against a wall for support. I couldn’t breathe. I was making an odd, gagging sound as my mouth started foaming up. I coughed and spit, trying to get rid of the extra saliva. The walls around me began to spin and I collapsed. My vision blurs and my lungs scream for air. I lay on my side, still gasping. Watts walks over to me and leans over me. 

“I may not have put Secordeas in your food. We ran out anyway, but I did put Zedera in instead,” he grinned at me. “I didn't want you to get away with exactly what you’re doing now.”

Zedra was a poison that put its victim in a coma until the antidote was found, which is a pretty common mushroom that I know they have. They just didn't want me to attempt to escape on the day I didn't have a brain-rotting drug in my food.

I glare at him and spit in his face. The saliva hits his forehead and he glares at me. He raised his hand like he was going to hit me, but I blacked out before his palm collided with my face. 

**********************************************************************************************

I awoke with my hands and feet strapped to a metal slab. I knew where I was. This was where Deidre lived. The plant just hasn’t found me yet.

I tried to get out from the shackles that were pinning me to the slab. There were shackles around my wrists and ankles. There was one pinned around my belly and one was wrapped around my neck. I’ve been in this room hundreds of times, but it never terrified me this terribly. Maybe it’s because I knew they were trying to kill me. 

I heard the familiar slithering of the plant’s vines coming toward him. I shiver as the plant wrapped around my body. The vines started clawing into my nearly healed scars and opened them back up. I bit back a scream of pain. The same thing happened to my back, arms, legs, and stomach. I squeezed my eyes shut. I could feel the plant vines wiggling and burrowing inside me. I knew what was going to happen.

A pulling feeling was inside me as the plant tried to rip my magic out of me. It felt like someone was trying to carve the little muscle I had off of me from the inside. I screamed and thrashed but I felt my magic being torn from me. I’d be burning hot for a minute and then drop to cold over and over again.

At around 2 hours, which was the longest I’d ever been in here, my vision began to blur. My body aches and I don't have the energy to thrash. My breathing became shallow and I could feel my heart failing to pump blood to my body. 

Every so often a guard would come in to see if I was dead. But this time, instead of it being a guard, I saw Nero’s face peeking through the door. 

“Nero?” I whispered. He ran to me. A relieved expression on his face as he took a knife and slashed it through the plant's vines.

I collapsed as he released me from the shackles. He caught me and held me close as I gasped and wheezed pathetically.

“Can you walk?” he questioned quickly. 

“My magic was just torn away from my body,” I began, panting, “ and I was poisoned with Zedra. Yes, dimbat. I feel like I can run a mile.'' I finish sarcastically.

Nero rolls his eyes and sprints out of the room, cradling me like I was a baby. He presses himself against a wall as I hear voices talking. They were talking about our escape. 

I could feel my magic filling me up already. Filling in the cracks that were torn from me, concentrating on a pile of barrels near the guards talking. A burst of magic surged through me and the barrels toppled over, causing a racket. While the guards went and investigated what had happened, Nero ran to the other side and up the stairs. The guards ran toward him but I made a force field around us. When they came into the force field range, they were blasted back. Nero ran up a staircase, and then another. We burst through a door at the top of a stairwell. He kept running and barreled through a door at the end of the hallway with dark gray wallpaper. The light was all around me as Nero tripped and we rolled. We kept rolling down what felt like a hill. 

I remembered rolling down hills as a young child. 

We stop rolling and I lay still for a moment. There is a soft breeze. It’s… warm. Natural. I can feel things pricking me, but not hurting me, instead, it’s a little itchy. I heard Watt's rough voice, telling the guards to let us go. I remember that they were cursed to stay within a certain distinct from a popular city. The prison we came from must be on the edge of the land they can travel.

I slowly open my eyes.

Green was all around me. I gave my eyes a moment to adjust.

Grass.

The grass was all around us. Long, green hairs that stick up out of the dirt. I look up. The sun was burning my eyes. But it felt good. 

We had no windows in our cells. I haven't seen the sun in ten years. 

I laugh and roll in the meadow. There were trees. 10-20 times as big as I am. The breeze rushes back, and my sorcery welcomes it. I feel stronger than I ever have before. I could feel my magic tingling, the parts that had it stripped away were filling up faster than ever. For a moment, I felt safe, complete, and at rest.

I then remember Nero.

I jerked my head up and scanned around. I saw Nero sitting up and grinning at me. He is covered in mud, and he had a long scratch down his arm that I didn't notice before, but he was O.K.

“Done playing in the mud?” he asked cheerfully. “Kip, you looked like you were 6 again.”

“I was six the last time I touched the grass.”

“Oh.” he scanned me up and down. “Can you walk now? Or do I have to carry you again?”

I jump up and run over to him. I used his shoulder to steady myself because the blood had rushed to my head and I got a little dizzy. But I could walk.

Nero got up, and we walked through the meadow. Not knowing what we would come up next, I had a feeling we weren’t going to see that place again. 

But then again, It’s just a feeling.