The Cage Beneath - Elara
The stench of damp stone and iron filled my lungs long before I opened my eyes. For a heartbeat I thought I was still dreaming—still wandering through the town where I'd finally felt accepted, strong in the pack. Then reality slammed into me like Hector’s boot all over again.
My wrists were bound, coarse rope cutting into skin already blistered from the forge. The knots had been tied by someone who knew rope—tight, neat, with no slack. My ankles were chained to a rusted iron ring sunk deep into the dungeon floor. Cold seeped up through the stones and into my bones. My head throbbed at the base of my skull, and a fresh, hot sting radiated from my ribs where the boot had landed this morning. Pain mapped itself across my body in familiar lines; I breathed around it, testing what moved and what did not. If I am breathing and I can see out of one eye, I tell myself, I can keep on going. In an odd, small mercy, it reminded me of home. On rainy nights at my cottage I always fell asleep to the gentle tick of water on the eaves. That memory steadied something inside me—an anchor I could find when the rest of the world tried to slide out from under me.
Boots echoed on the floor above. Heavy, deliberate, the sound of men who knew they held all the power. Two warriors stopped outside my cell. Their armor whispered; their cloaks made fabric sounds like breathing. I lay very still as their gazes slid over me, feeling their eyes like knives. The first one spat the words like they were bits of bread for a dog.
“She’ll keep,” he muttered, tossing a glance to his companion. “Orders are to leave her until the Beta comes for inspection.”
The other snorted, leaning his spear against the bars with a clank that made my teeth ache. “Inspection. Sounds like she’s more trouble than she’s worth. Poor little blacksmith girl—doesn’t even know why she’s down here.”
They laughed then, the kind of laugh that tastes of cruelty. One of them tapped the bars with his knuckles until the ring of metal sent a vibration up my wrist and into the broken places in my ribs. I swallowed the retort that was burning at my tongue like hot coal. Rage would get me nowhere—at least not yet. I covered my ears with shaking hands, pointless against the ringing, and kept my face turned away. Let them enjoy the sight of me squirming. Let them think that’s what I was.
After a while their feet receded, their voices drifting up the stairwell until silence came back like a second set of chains.
When I was learning to temper and bend steel, my father taught me a strange rule about grief. “Feel it quick,” he’d say, “like a strike. Then move on.” He wanted me to be able to take the blow and turn it into fire at the anvil. Now, alone in the dark, I counted the ten seconds he’d taught me. I had to make it mechanical; sadness was a luxury I could not afford, not here.
One. My eyes filled. The salt ran down my cheeks.
Two. The sobs came, jagged and inconvenient, but they had the usefulness of a steam release.
Three. My body shook and I let my hair slip in front of my face, hiding the smallness of the whimper.
Four. Whispered insults—old things people had thrown at me over the years—spooled through my mind. “You’ll never amount to anything.” “You don’t belong.” They slid in like burrs.
Five. The old voice that said if I died no one would notice chimed in with its sour certainty. I clung to it and then shoved it off.
Six. The sobs grew, loud enough to feel like sound I could strike, not sound that leveled me.
Seven. I wiped my nose with the back of my sleeve, stubborn like a toddler.
Eight. I said out loud, because speaking is a kind of proof, “I’m not dying here.”
Nine. I howled—a sound that shook muscles and rattled the dust over my shoulder—and let it be messy.
Ten. I wiped my face, rolled my shoulders, breathed deep and pulled the last of the sadness into the dirt on my cheek like an ember to be saved, not wasted.
When the counting stopped, something else stirred beneath the fear. It started hot and slow like coals in a newly banked hearth. It was an old, useless word for it—something folks called stubbornness, or pride. It was also something my father would have named: work. There is power in craft. There is a language in metal—how it cools, how it resists, where a strike will break it or bend it. My hands remembered even while they were bound; my fingers itched for hammer and tongs as if they might draw those tools out by will alone.
I shifted, testing the chain at my ankle. Rust flaked, gritty against my skin. The ring was set low in the floor, but the iron had seen weather and time; it had weak spots. I imagined the chain like a blade and my mind, for the first time since Hector’s boot, found the thin, clean line of a plan.
My breath ticked slow against the storm that had settled into my chest. I imagined the motion—tiny, deliberate, painstaking—of working a rope until it yielded, of twisting the chain against its ring until the metal gave the tiniest sound. I could feel the plan like a muscle flexing under skin. That strength had no name. It was not anger; it was a stubborn, practical heat that had kept me alive through knocks and scrapes my whole life.
I flexed what fingers I could around the rope, feeling the coarse fibers rasp the calluses into smaller ridges. The pain at my wrists pinned me to the present. Pain is an honest ledger; it tells you what you can still pay for. I accepted the bill and set to work.
The ember of strength burned brighter. I shivered, not from cold this time but because my body was preparing itself. Whatever came next, I would meet it not as a frightened thing, but as someone who knew how to make use of the smallest advantage.
I began to move, slow as a man loosening a stubborn bolt, listening for the sound that would tell me whether I’d just begun my undoing—or my freedom.