62nd of Ash, 120
A scream of unbridled terror left him as he hit the floor of the cell-like room, and backed up to the framed wooden door. The beast that charged him caught its neck on the chain that bound it to the far wall, but the strangling pressure didn't stay the construct from its vicious blood rage. Shrill shriek-like wails left its choked throat as it swiped at Arkash, missing a foot or so as the rath backed into the floor. All rational thought and will left him in its presence, there was nothing he could do to fight it or defend himself. If the beast got free of its chain somehow, Arkash was a goner.
"The fuck's wrong with you?" Called the jastai from the other side of the door. "It's just a fuckin' 'ollow. Kill it!" That it was. The beast that swung and slashed at Arkash was no other than the tool that the Celebrant and Argent used to oppress the lower castes. It was the same tool that had taken his mother from him, taken his arm and his eye. It was the tool that kept him up at night in his youth with its screeching and howling, as it chased down a nameless sod that had wronged its masters. Arkash had plenty of reason to fear them, and in its face, he cried and screamed, he begged the jastai to let him out in a series of defeated wails and whines. The sight of the thing had broken him.
He couldn't fight back through the heat of his phobic panic, he could do nothing but weakly back into the unrelenting wooden door, sob, and cry in futility. The hollow didn't tire; it didn't need to breathe or rest. It kept coming at him with vicious swipes, actively trying to destroy him per Kahl's command. Arkash had his weapons, the blade of his prosthetic arm; he certainly had the means to kill the beast, but his body couldn't move.
Disgusted, Kahl slammed the slider of the door shut and yelled muffledly into the door. Arkash could barely hear him over the sound the hollow's raspy shrieking and the thundering roll of his own heartbeat in his ears. There, at the foot of the door, he squeezed his earholes with both his hand and his stump arm and shut his eyes. Vivid images and memories ran through his vision. Fear, blood, and pain became his world as memories long forgotten unlocked and bared themselves to him.
An eternity had passed, or so it felt. It was as though he'd spent days in the darkness with the screeching, murderous hollow. His head pounded and throbbed with the effects of dehydration, his leather tabard was stained with the amber oily fluid that was his venom-laced spit, and he found himself emotionally numb and physically exhausted. He hadn't been there for days, it was the best part of an hour or two, but he'd cried his eye out and strained his voice with his constant begging and sobs. Needless to say, he was burned out.
Arkash stared on in a haze of exhaustion and pain while the beast swung and swiped at him. The clack of the slider sounded above him, and Kahl's voice called "you still alive in there?" In vithmi.
Arkash swallowed hard in his dry, tacky maw, then cleared his throat of the caught phlegm and venom before he swallowed, then squeezed the front of his head. "Yeah," he returned in the same tongue.
"You stopped crying, I figured you'd passed out," he noted.
Arkash exhaled hard through his nose and shook his head. "No," he affirmed, then fell back as the door behind him gave out.
"Brucey, fuck off," Kahl spoke in common, and the captive hollow ceased its attacks and returned to shadows of the room.
Meanwhile, Arkash scrambled to turn over, then skittered across the ground, only to be gripped by the collar of his tabard and lifted off the floor onto his feet. There, he stumbled and fell against the wall far wall with pained, pathetic whimpers of self-pity. Kahl slammed the door shut, then offered the rath an oversized, but full waterskin. Once he'd gotten over the initial shock, he accepted the waterskin and struggled with the weight with his prosthetic stump and his claws both, but drank from its contents all the same. Sweet water wettened his palette and steadily rejuvenated him. Very slowly, the ache in his head began to ease while he drank, and filled his stomach with much-needed fluids.
"Well, you didn't piss yourself," Kahl noted after looking the rath up and down. "Didn't realize you were venomous though," he motioned to the amber stains on the leathers of his tabard.
Arkash paused in his drinking to take a breath, and looked to Kahl with his tired yellow eye and nodded. Once he was done, he put a cap on the waterskin, then offered it back to the jastai, who accepted the bag and stowed it on the belt beneath the furs he adorned himself with.
"What's your problem with hollows, anyway?" The jastai asked most casually after a moment of silence.
Arkash shook his head, then wiped at his lips with the tips of his fingers. "I don't want to talk about it," he answered with a deep breath through his nose, then a ragged exhale from his mouth. "...Why'd you put me in there?" Why did they have a captive hollow at all?
The jastai drew a deep breath through his nose, then sighed while he considered the best way to answer the posed question. "You're never gonna get over it by hiding; you need to face shit to overcome it," the jastai explained. That was why the man locked Arkash in a room with a raving hollow? To get him to face his fears? If he wasn't as exhausted as he was, the rathari would have been furious. What gave kahl the right to do something like that to him? Did he have any idea how much it hurt to relive Arkash's memories?
The Rathari hissed briefly, then held his head firm and exhaled. It felt as though his brain was trying to crawl out of his skull. Kahl simply rose his brows and pursed his lips at the rath, then shrugged. As though he was done there, he walked on down the hall without Arkash. The rathari stared at the jastai with his one eye in a mixture of disbelief and rage. Did Kahl really just do that to him, then walk off? Like it was nothing? Arkash hissed, then looked back to the door that the hollow rested behind.
Oddly enough, he didn't feel as frightened of the hollow at that time. Perhaps it was his emotional exhaustion? Whether that was the case or not, his body still steeled against any attempt to move toward the door, regardless of how hard he tried to push on. Even if Kahl was an asshole in Arkash's view, he had a point; Arkash needed to overcome his fear of hollows, especially if he was meant to kill an Errant Knight and lure its hollow away.
With all his force of will, he urged his legs to move, and he took a step toward the door. He hesitated while he stared, then moved forward another step and took the handle with his claws. Just as soon as he took hold of the handle, he bared his teeth and let it go as though the metal was burning hot. He turned away, then looked to his one full hand and quickened his breathing. He had to be angry if he wanted to gather the strength to face his demons.
The hollow behind the door was the one that had killed Liu, he convinced himself. It was that one which had started the downward spiral of his life and robbed him of his mother. Arkash furrowed his brow and curled his mangled nose, then gripped the handle of the door, twisted it, and pulled it open without pause. His body felt weak and his legs tried to freeze, but Arkash stormed on in, drew his shortsword, and... froze. He saw the beast, the hollow, a mere foot or two from where he stood, and he froze. The false life looked to him expectantly while Arkash's prosthetic arm rattled at the intensity of his shaking.
He saw the beast run at him and break his ribs with a strike of its hammer. He saw it mercilessly strike his head with its sword and take his eye, then mangle his arm with a heavy strike to his forearm to ensure it couldn't be repaired. He watched in the haze of his consciousness as the monsters continued to beat and stab him, and accepted that he would die that day, but he didn't He was on his feet again, being struck by one of the hollow's hammers...
"Arkash," called Kahl's voice, and drew the rathari from his overwhelming memory loop. Arkash looked to Kahl with a pinprick pupil for his eye just in time to see the jastai drive the hollows head into the stone wall and squash it like a gourd. Lifeless and inanimate, the hollow fell to the ground. Arkash could do little but stammer and stutter at the sight, then startled as the jastai walked by and pat him on the shoulder. "That's how it's done," Kahl explained, then proceeded into the hall and disappeared from the range of Arkash's hearing.
Arkash stayed there in the dark for a moment or two and stared at the broken hollow. It was dead, just like that. It couldn't hurt him or rob any more children of their mothers. Arkash approached the pile of lorienium and took a knee at its side. With a push of his shortsword, Arkash penetrated the skin of the dead hollow, then pushed the point of his blade fully into the creature's chest. It wasn't alive; it was never alive. It was a tool, much like the blade that Arkash wielded. The hand that guided it was far from the darkness of Lower Nivenhain. Of course, that didn't absolve Arkash of his fear, but it did help him realize where the true evils of the world laid.
Image source.
