The Grindstone of Despair

Time, that intangible measurement in his past life that governed exams and trains, melted in the Castle of Shadows into the indistinguishable rhythm of shadow and black, broken only by the different missions and the persistent throbbing in the muscles of his body. Weeks, possibly a month and more, could have passed from that first meeting with Vayne. Sora had long ago stopped keeping count. Passing each "day" was the only reachable horizon.

The routine was a grindstone, wearing down the spirit as relentlessly as the body. Scrubbing dirty, greasy floors, lifting heavy loads that strained his back, washing the remains of hot and often stomach-churning meals, enduring the chronic cold and damp seeping into his very marrow. He learned to move delicately, to pre-empt the commands before they were bellowed, to bow his head and his eyes and wear his blank face to fend off any incautious observation. The original, sharp, paralyzing fear had dulled to a dull, chronic fear, the undercurrent that governed his existence but failed to paralyze it in its tracks. The necessity to just get on, to work, to breathe, overrode everything else.

But he observed. With the sharp periphery awareness of captive prey, he observed details. Guard patrol patterns in some of the corridors. Guard-changing times at the less-frequented interior gates, give or take. The angry or frightened glances some of the servants threw at the guards when they believed they were not being watched. And the brutality. Always brutality, masked or unmasked. He'd witnessed the pushes, the slaps, overheard stifled cries of pain from the neighboring cells. He was getting used to it, he saw with the detached shock of horror, viewing some distasteful film and not living it.

On one particularly dismal day, rain hammered furiously at the castle's high narrow slits and arrow loops, beating out the same dull, dismal clang that underscored the relentless drips in the corridors. Sora was to help unload a newly come in supply cart—burlap satchels of coarse grain and barrels of something with the smell of salted fish—into one of the promulgating interior storage courtyards, a cold courtyard walled high and half-sheltered under a rotten wooden roof. The work was exhausting, and the ground was slippery with thick, cold mud, hard to balance upon. Other servants labored in silence with him, faces as grey and hollow as the sky.

That was when it happened. Pimples pocking his wan face, one of the servants, a boy not many years older than Sora, struggled to lift very heavy sacks. He slipped in the mire, the bag escaped his grasp, and fell with a muffled thud into the muck. The coarse weave tore a little, and a gush of grain — valuable, though it was the poorest grade—fell out onto the dirty mud.

An uneasy silence fell upon the small group of workers. Everyone's eyes were glued to the spilled grain, then to the pale, horror-filled face of the young man. The warehouse overseer, a hulking man with a cloudy eye and a slash across the lower lip, moved forward with threatening, measured steps.

"Fool," he growled, his gravelly voice laced with anger. "Do you know the work it takes to replace it? Do you know the trouble it takes to get it delivered to this god-forsaken place?"

The young person apologized, fumbling clumsily to attempt to pick the grain out of the mud with trembling hands. No use. It was too dirty, irretrievable.

Just then, Kenji came to the courtyard door, checking his tour. His gaze swept the scene before him: the grain spilling about, the trembling boy, the surly overseer. He did not ask what was wrong. His eyes seemed to take in the entire picture in a single sweep. His face, as ever, was a blank mask.

He approached the young man, who stood stiff with fear.

"Waste," he whispered, but it cut like ice. It wasn't anger in his tone, but cold recognition of the truth. "Negligence comes at a price. Weakness weighs you down. We can't bear burdens in his place."

The boy didn't have time to beg or struggle back. Kenji's hand moved in a blur. It wasn't the open-handed slap he'd been dreading to fear, but the closed, vicious punch into the stomach. The air was knocked from the boy's lungs in a stifled gasp. The boy doubled over, gasping. Kenji grabbed the collar of his tattered tunic and struck again, across the jaw, a ghastly dull thud that whipped the boy's head back in a vicious lash. He fell back into the mud, dazed.

But Kenji wasn't finished. With cold detachment, he kicked the boy's ribs and stomach over and over while he was helpless on the ground. No cries, just the soggy, repulsive noises of the kicks and the boy's stifled gasps for air. The other servants stood stock-still where they were, eyes averted, trying not to see, though the beating could be heard in the courtyard. No one attempted to halt him. No one would dare.

After what seemed the passage of centuries but must have been mere seconds, Kenji stopped. He stood over the youth who remained in the mud, his chest hardly rising and falling. Then he turned to the overseer.

"Make sure to prepare him for double-duty tomorrow," he ordered in the same monotone voice. "And charge the grain to his. rations. Let him learn."

He brushed a fleck of dirt from his leather gauntlet as if the incident never took place. For a moment, his gaze swept the rest of the servants, including Sora. No visible threat in them, only the cold reassertion of control and the cost of defeat. He took his leave and walked on.

The overseer ordered two of the other slaves to take the injured boy out of the courtyard. They did so, expressionless faces. Sora watched them take him away, leaving a mud-streaked trail and, Sora feared, blood on the ground. He didn't know if the boy was going to survive, or if "recovery" was only putting off his agony before he eventually died.

Something within Sora cracked in that instant. It wasn't the stranger's shock; he saw cruelty. It was the cold, calculating extravagance of the violence. The utter contempt for the life and wellbeing of a person who was "useless" or "neglectful." It was the cold indifference of the agent of a system that allowed for no mistakes, no weakness. It was the cold conviction seeping into his chest: he too was weak. He too was expendable. One mistake, one lapse ofiveness, one sickness… and that could be him, on the ground to be dragged off like rubbish.

This gradual destruction of hope he endured culminated in one terrifying fact: to stay in the Castle of Shadows was to die a slow death or, worse, to be converted into one of the hollow, terror-filled creatures infesting the Castle. The only recourse, impossible as it may seem, was to escape. It was no longer a general desire, a daydream of desperation. It was a burning necessity, a life imperative as simple as breathing.

That "night," huddled on his pallet in the damp, cold black of his cell, the fear was there, more intense than ever before. This time, however, it was coupled with something new: a feverish, desperate intent. For the first time since capture, his mind started to think not just to get through the present, but to scheme. He started to go over the things as he learned them almost instinctively again and again again: At what time of day did the interior walls between the kitchens seem to be least guarded? Had he ever seen a drain grille wide enough for a man of his size possibly to fit through? When did Kenji take his longer patrols in the upper reaches of the castle, leaving himself sometimes less watched?

The odds were infinitesimal, and the penalties were titanic. Defeat, as he himself had just witnessed, was punished horribly. The alternative, however—the bruised boy dragged in the mud—was more repugnant. Despair's millstone ground on. Desperation at his current circumstances didn't numb but drove him forward. Outside the black of his cell, the boy who fell from the heavens, Sora Hikari, began to weave the first, dangerous threads of an escape plot. Fear locked his throat, but the germ of speechless revolt, sown in sheerest desperation, took hold.