Chapter 7: Chapter 7 – Trest

He just had to hope this man wouldn’t ignore him like the other prisoners. Before he asked his questions, he took a few moments to inspect his fellow prisoner. The man had closed his eyes and had found a sitting position, supporting himself with the bricks at the back of the cell. Grayson had to admit he was impressed. The man was wearing what appear to be a couple of sacks that had been cut in such a way as to allow them to be worn, and the makeshift garments didn’t do much to hide well-defined muscles. If this man was a general, as had been said, he wasn’t the type to lead from behind the lines.

The other prisoner let out a sigh before opening his eyes and shifting his gaze to look straight at him. Grayson gave the general an awkward smile, embarrassed that the man had noticed the examination. The prisoner took his own turn examining Grayson before he frowned as if he were trying to solve a particularly challenging puzzle.

Finally, the man spoke, breaking the silence. “Where have you been hiding all this time?”

“Hiding?” Grayson asked, unsure what the man meant.

General Trest gestured at him, “You’re obviously a Valintian. I thought all of your kind fled league territory when the war started. You wouldn’t be suffered to stay here if you were found by the league, so where were you hiding all this time.”

“I’m not Valintian,” Grayson said, I don’t even know what that means.

The general looked at him sharply. “Are you mocking me?”

“No, I’m not mocking you, I truly don’t know what Valintian means.”

The general gave him a searching look before speaking. “Very well, if you are not from Valint, where are you from?”

Grayson debated with himself on how to answer the question. Part of him just wanted to tell the truth because it was the easiest answer he could give, but the other part argued that he needed information from this man, and if he said he was from a different world called Earth, the man would certainly think he was either mocking him or just straight crazy. Neither would make it easier to get answers. Instead, he went with the only thing he could think of.

“I’m from a place far, far from here.”

“From the other continent then,” General Trest said, “I wasn’t aware of another place with people that have Valintian features, but I suppose the fact that you aren’t marked supports your claim.”

“Why would you come to league territory then? Word of the war must have spread throughout the entire world at this point. You should have known with the similarities you wouldn’t be welcome in these lands.”

Grayson was feeling much less confident with his lie. He had no idea how to answer that question satisfactorily, so he just smiled without speaking.

The general nodded at that. “I’ll let you keep your secrets, not much I could do to get them from you anyway. But that doesn’t explain what you are doing here with me. Just looking like a Valintian wouldn’t earn you this kind of treatment.”

“I touched the statue of Velos in the city.”

The general’s eyes shot wide open, and he gave Grayson an incredulous look.

“I wish I could have been there for that.” The man said. “Those priests have always been so protective of their statue. It must have been quite the spectacle. Though I am curious as to why you decided to touch the effigy in the first place.”

“You know, I really don’t know what I was thinking.” Grayson said truthfully.

The general just raised an eyebrow at that, and silence lapsed as the man seemed to have run out of questions, or simply didn’t care enough to pry any further. Grayson decided it was his turn to ask some questions of his own. But as he thought of what he wanted to know, he realized his lie about his origins was going to make it much harder to get answers. At this point, most of the things he wanted on were things that this general surely wouldn’t know, or things that anyone on the planet should already know. After running through the list of questions he had, only one seemed like it would be a promising start.

“They say I’m going to be sent to the proving grounds. What does that mean?”

The general gave him a measuring look before responding. “You must be from very far away if you have never heard of the proving grounds. It is an extremely dangerous aquadome. The most dangerous animals in the planet live there. No one would venture there if it weren’t the only place where ascension pearls can be harvested. And so, to gain the power of the pearls you must prove yourself in the area, hence the name proving grounds. We’ll be sent in there to harvest the pearls until we die, so the league can stave off Valintians.”

When the general finished speaking, he sounded tired.

Grayson closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He had been sentenced to death for touching a statue. He wanted to scream, but decided to ask another question to keep his mind off his impending doom.

“What about them?” Grayson asked, gesturing at the prisoners on the other side of the room.

The general snorted. The women will be sent to the proving grounds along with us. The men will most likely be drafted into the army, though that isn’t much safer than the proving grounds.

“Then why are we being separated?” Grayson asked.

The general let out a growl and looked genuinely angry, which surprised Grayson. The man had taken all kinds of abuse from the guards and hadn’t done a thing, but now he looked about ready to tear someone’s head off.

“Who knows.” the general said. “The league has been getting more desperate over time. Now that the war is so close to a tipping point, they won’t want to do anything to risk their supply of pearls. It’s likely that this side of the prison is for actual criminals, and that side is for the people who were simply unlucky enough to end up here. My guess is that most fell too far into debt, though I imagine some failed to reach a quota on crops raised for the war effort. It wouldn’t surprise him if some of them just happened to be walking in the wrong place at the wrong time

“They can’t do that.” Grayson said in outrage.

The general sighed, his angry expression leaving him, and once again he simply looked tired. “They can and they will. The Valintians will not be kind if they do manage to win the war, especially to the nobility.”

It was clear now that Grayson needed to escape. It was that or wait to be killed in the proving grounds. He had no idea how to do it on his own, but maybe this man would be able to, and Grayson could tag along.

Grayson moved closer and spoke to the general in little more than a whisper.

“Then let’s escape. We can get out of here and try to do something about it.”

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The man grew somber then, and a look of deep sadness crossed over his face.

“Even if I could escape, I wouldn’t. I belong here. I deserve this.”

“What about me? What about them? Grayson asked, gesturing at the prisoners at the other side of the room. Do we deserve to die?”

Grayson knew it was the wrong thing to say as soon as the words left his lips. The general gave him a hard look before closing his eyes and refusing to speak any longer, effectively killing the conversation.

Grayson sighed and look up and the ceiling trying to parse through the new information, though he soon stumbled back and fell into his pile of hay in a haze as a realization hit him.

Was this all some kind of twisted game to Velos? Grayson thought. Did he kidnap me from another world and feed me lies to watch me suffer for his own entertainment? Was anything he told me the truth?

He had known he wouldn’t like the proving grounds, but he hadn’t thought they would be sending him there to die.

Grayson sat there for a long time, until night came, and he kept sitting there, and the only thing he could think was - why me? Of all the people on earth, why did it have to be him in this situation? Grayson knew he was spiraling, but this was becoming too much.

Eventually, sleep took him, but when he woke in the morning, nothing had changed. He was in the same cell, in the same situation as before. He steeled himself, making a promise. He wouldn’t die some useless death on this planet. He wouldn’t let Velos win. He wouldn’t be a plaything for the god. He would find a way to force the Velos to send him back home. The first step was finding a way to escape.

Grayson decided to review everything he had learned until this point. Anything with Velos he decided to throw out for now because he had no idea if the god had said anything true in their entire conversation. Instead, he focused on what he had learned since he had arrived on Selenya.

He was in the great city of Silmia. From what he could make out of the conversation with the general, Silmia was part of some kind of league, perhaps with other cities or countries, and they were fighting against some place called Valint, and it sounded like it wasn’t going too well. Valint seemed to be a country of people that looked like Grayson. He had heard that these Valintians were marked twice now, but he had no idea what that meant.

It was nice to finally have a concrete reason for why his fellow prisoners were glaring at him all the time. Being trapped in the same prison as a hated enemy couldn’t have been a pleasant experience for them.

The next thing he had learned was that Velos’s church appeared to be a force, at least in this city, though Grayson assumed it was more widespread than just Silmia.

Most recently, General Trest had told him that the proving grounds were a dangerous aquadome.

I wonder if the place I arrived in this world was an aquadome, Grayson thought. Aquadome definitely seemed like a good description for the place he had been. He could see the aquadomes being some kind of magical pocket that allowed sea creatures to live on land.

Now all I need to do is use the information I have to escape prison and take on a god. Grayson chuckled to himself. Should be easy.

He was committed to escaping now. There was no way he was going to lie down and let them kill him. As he thought about it, he decided it would probably be best to wait to escape while they were in transport. He had no way of picking the lock on his cell, and even if he did, there was no way he was going to get past the guards.

He had absolutely no fighting experience. Grayson looked at the adjacent cell with the general. Grayson had angered the man, but it might still be possible to recruit him to an escape effort, he would need to be careful how he did it.

***

When mealtime came, the same two guards came by as always with their bowls of mush. When they walked up to his cell, the baton wielder called out to him while the other guard retrieved his old bowl and replaced it with a new one.

“Crazy man.” The baton wielder called out. They had started calling him crazy ever since he had told them the story behind his imprisonment. “The warden said to pass along that Lady Altera reviewed your case and declined further investigation.”

Grayson sighed, but he had known this was coming. It had been a distant hope that he would be able to get out because of this Lady Altera, but any hope right now was something to cling onto.

The guards moved onto the general’s cell and the customary wooden bowl was tossed through the grate with little regard before the two guards walked off.

Much of the meager contents spilled out before the general was able to snag the bowl and save the rest of the contents. Though from the looks of it they had given him even less than what they had given Grayson the first few days of his imprisonment.

The general ate what was in the bowl, but declined to eat the portion that had spilled onto the ground. It was a testament to how far Grayson had fallen that he wasn’t sure if he would be able to do the same. The constant hunger was starting to drive him crazy. He had already lost a decent amount of weight, and he was fairly skinny in the first place.

***

Two more days passed by, and the general hadn’t said a single word since their first conversation. The cells continued to fill up, until most of them had two people wallowing inside. In the evening on the second day, some kind of doctor came to the prison, and the guards helped him do something to each of the prisoners. Grayson couldn’t tell at first what it was, but as they moved through the cells he eventually got a good look at what they were doing.

The man was using a needle to prick each prisoner's finger. When blood welled up, he placed it into a little vial of water. After the blood was in the water, the man would inspect the vial for a minute or so before moving on to the next prisoner.

“What are they doing?” He asked the general in the cell next to him.

The man finally broke his silence with a snort. “They’re checking to ensure that no one in here has enough noble blood in them to gain access to the ascendant pearl's power. They can’t have people harvesting the pearls who can use them.”

The doctor eventually made his way to Grayson’s cell after going through the same process with every other prisoner, including the general. The guards came in and restrained him, and the doctor took his blood, and just like with every other prisoner the doctor simply nodded, packed up his things and left.

From this little checkup, Grayson got the feeling that they would be leaving soon, and he was right.

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