​Enslaved: Chapter 2 Interlude: The Dream, Part 1

Enslaved: Chapter 2 Interlude: The Dream, Part 1

To clarify this confusing title, I'm not sure where I'm going to place this next sequence, other than somewhere within Chapter 2. I'm trying to focus a little more on Arvad's internal thought processes, and why he seems like such a passive character. Anyway.

Arvad awoke to find that he was not in the storeroom in which he had fallen asleep but was instead surrounded by a dense mist. Taking care not to provoke his still-recovering injuries, he pressed himself up into a crouching position from the uneven stone ground and peered into the swirling grey. He heard the familiar sounds of his nightmares; the tramping of small marching feet, the sawing friction of taut rope against tree branch, the whispers of the dead.

“Arvad,” croaked a voice at his feet, almost choking on the word through a ruined face.

The Slim Ulusami lay there, broken as he had been in the slave market. The slaver had never called him by name in life and Arvad found that it troubled him that he could not recall his tormentor’s name.

“Was it worth it boy? Was your bravado worth my life?” Blood was seeping from the body onto the ground, but not into it. The stone refused the Ulusami.

“A man is as a man does,” Arvad recited distractedly, morbidly curious at the broken form beneath him. “Sarah was mine to protect, such is the way of my people.”

The slaver cackled madly, bloody spittle spraying his cheeks, “you are owned. You have no people.” Coughs wracked his body, halting the conversation for a few moments as the mist gathered even more tightly around them. The Ulusami visibly calmed, and his voice seemed almost pensive as he remarked, “My life was sold and the bargain was a fool’s.” His body crumbled to a thick grey ash and dissipated into the mist. A wind rose to disperse it, thick with the muttering of sibilant voices.

Unnerved, Arvad turned to and fro, seeking the direction of whispers that arose with the passing of the slaver. They seemed questioning; urgent yet uncertain. He could not make out their words and soon lost himself in the fog walking hurriedly towards their disembodied voices.

“Arvad,” chanted two young voices in unison, one male one female. For a moment the mist thinned and Arvad could make out their shapes to his left. He lurched toward the shapes, but lost sight of them in the ashen cloud. Suddenly they were there before him, mere feet away. Sarah and Danil standing sombrely, arm in arm, wearing the garish clothes in which the slavers had gifted them as kitchen-slaves.

“You kneel before a master and forget your friends, who marched beside you, beneath the whip?” Danil arched an eyebrow, his familiar joking tone absent, his face grim.

“I’ve forgotten no-one,” Arvad protested. “I cut wood, scrub desks, mend tallow, cart cloth and papers. I am burned, beaten and derided but I’ve forgotten nothing!”

Sarah’s face held none of the panic and fear of their journey, only disappointment. She stepped forward and stretched to reach his forehead. “You remember us”. She moved her hand lower, over his panic-driven heart, “but you forget us. What tears have you shed? What escape have you attempted? What rescue? What effort have you made to see if we even survived?

Arvad was silent before her accusations. He had asked himself these same questions, hating himself for the excuses that kept him obedient and ignorant. To disobey Erunian was to earn his ire, but worse, his owner was his only protection from the brutal life of a slave in the unfamiliar city. One only feared to harm a slave if they feared the master’s response.

“You labour to the letter of your Master’s orders and arrive at his beck and call”. Sarah broke the silence, her voice wavering now, uncertain. “We are your kin, but we are less,” the murky clouds around she and Danil warped suddenly, “than nothing.”

Figures solidified from the mist, grabbing Danil and Sarah. The two slaves screamed in anguish but barely struggled as the figures carried them back, away from Arvad.

He shouted back at them, barrelling into the mist with the same rage he had felt in the market square. Thick ropes lashed at him from the gloom to trip him, though he could see no hand bearing them. He crashed to the ground, winded by the fall. He saw Danil and Sarah carried off by the shadow; her arm was held out toward him but he could not tell if she sought aid or to accuse him of another failure. He tried to rise, but collapsed.

A whip struck his back, shredding his shirt and cutting deeply into the skin beneath it. His body arched and he rolled over, starring sightlessly into the mist toward where his assailant should have been, but there was none. He lay there and considered giving up entirely; just waiting for the shadows to take him too. Instead, he rolled into a crouch, quickly removed the ruined shirt, and set about ripping strips from it to make a makeshift bandage. Tears stung his eyes as he wrapped it around his torso and the new wound, but he did not call out. There was no one to hear.