Chains. They’re the only thing I recognize. Here in this dark, so thick it chokes, these chains are both jailer and savior. I’ve been here so long now, I’ve lost track of everything. When they first threw me in here, the day the chains went on and the lights went out, I tried counting to keep track of the time. First in my head, then out loud. But eventually I fell asleep, and when I awoke I could no longer tell what time it was. That first night, I didn’t dream.

In a lot of ways, it was the best night I can remember.

In the dark, you go to sleep and you wake up, but you can never tell if you’re really awake. I think my eyes are closed, but it looks the same even when I think they’re not. I’m not sure anymore. Heavy on my wrists, old iron manacles locked and bolted. Chains running to two eyelets driven deep into the stone. I saw them on the day they put me here. How long ago was it now, I wonder? A day? Two? A week? Years? Who can say? I don’t even know if my eyes are open.

Its the dreams that are the worst. You go to sleep, you think you wake up but you’re not really sure. And then something moves in the darkness. The air shifts. Something scrapes. Skin on stone. Wet on dry. I feel the air move. Is something there? Is it my imagination? Is it a rat? Have they put something in here with me while I slept? Am I still asleep? Dreaming, right now? I try to wake up. I don’t feel any different. Am I awake? Then I hear the subtle clinking of the links together. And I’m relieved.

The chains. They hold me here, and yet at the same time they rescue me from the darkness by their very presence.

And then someone comes out of the darkness. A woman. I think I know her. She approaches, and I know I do. She is my wife, on the day we met. Dripping wet from her fall into the pond; shivering from the cold she comes to me. Embarrassed. Eyes downcast. Blushing as I offer her my coat. I hear the chains move as I hold it out to her, dragging against the stone. Chains? I don’t remember chains that day. I remember the birds. I remember her smell. Her white shoes. The sky so blue it hurt.

A serpent slithers between her feet. No. Thats not right. There were no snakes at the park that day. But it is there anyways, curling now around one of her legs. Its enormous. I can’t see its tail because of the dark. It just keeps coming, coil after coil, encircling the woman who would be my wife. No. This isn’t how it happened. Its not. “No!” I scream at the snake and the dark, but it ignores me, choosing instead to loop itself around her again. Her legs are gone now, buried beneath the massive body. Her waist is consumed by its writhing and still the snake climbs ever higher. I don’t want to watch so I try to shut my eyes, to look away. But the vision doesn’t go away. Its squeezing now, and she’s dying; her face first red then purple as she tries to draw breath. Her ribs are cracking, eyes bulging from their sockets. I’m screaming, hot tears streaming down my face as I watch her choked before me, the snake rearing up at last to strike. It hisses as it does, unhinging its jaw to better fit her head into its mouth. I’m straining at the chains, begging, pleading in unintelligible incantations for the horror to stop.

And it does.

I’m on my back.

I think.

It feels like there are stones beneath me. I move each arm carefully and there is soft restraint to my movements. The chains are still there, still holding me like a lamb for slaughter or a penitent wretch before the altar. I don’t know which.

You miss simple things. You miss the wind. You miss the heat of the day. I’d more gladly bake in the driest desert than stay here another moment. Perhaps thats it. Perhaps I’m in a desert right now, so delirious from thirst that I’ve begun to hallucinate this prison. I stretch out my hands for the pail of water and find it where it always is, half full, cool to touch and taste. Every day it leaves and every day it returns full. It is the only way I mark time. It brings with it a bowl of what I think is bread, it feels like bread, floating on the top. This is what time has become for me. Bucket-leaving and bucket-returning. It is the only time an exterior influence breaks my days. I have no way of knowing if my captors remove it at the same time every day, or if it is at different times. To me its all the same. The bucket leaves, and it is dark, and the bucket returns, and it is still dark.

The bucket leaves through a hole in the roof. At least I think thats where it goes. There is a rope tied to the handle that ascends towards the ceiling, and when its bucket-leaving the rope becomes taught and it rises beyond my head. My chains keep me from reaching above my head, so I am unsure if there is a hole or if it leaves by some other method. For awhile I kept the bowls the bread arrived in, hoping I might contrive from them some means of escape. But after weeks (Hours? Years?) of working with them I gave up. They did nothing against the stone or the chains and I was unable to break them to fashion any sort of tool. If I could have, it would have been a daring escape.

I’m here for a crime long forgotten. I spoke out against someone, I think. Perhaps it was a man. Or a government? I dissented. I disobeyed. I disagreed with their actions; their ‘policies.’ But what good is one man against a system? You can’t match power no matter your determination. These chains are the proof. No one was more dedicated to the cause than I. And yet here I am. No daring rescuers to save me, no uprising on my behalf. Just an old forgotten man chained to a hole somewhere they can forget about. And forgotten they have.

My water is gone. My food is gone. It feels like its been days since I’ve eaten. I would have rationed it if I knew it was going to stop coming, but how would I know? I hear nothing save for the chains and my mumblings. A little boy comes from a corner to hand me a loaf, but a crow snatches it from our hands before I can take it. Crying, he melts into the darkness as the crow flies off with his prize. Thank you my little friend. At least you tried.

A scraping sound. Not bucket-leaving. Something different. Another dream? Am I awake this time?

Bumps. Jingles. Clanks. More Scraping.

And then light.

I shout from the shock of it. Unintelligible words pour forth as it cuts a line through the darkness. Its been so long I’d forgotten what light looked like. But there it is, standing in front of me like a razor-thin ghost. Haunting me. Welcoming me into its ranks of dead, perhaps?

But no! It is spreading! The scraping brings it, grows it, spills it as it crawls. The stones, so heavy with the dark they too have forgotten it moan for its alightment, drinking it in like a river. Warming to its touch. Dismal shale and yet in their visibility more beautiful than the skies of Andromeda.

And then, the unthinkable. With a final groan the light gives birth to a doorway and a shadow. The monsters who share my cell howl at this insolence, furious at the intrusion. The doorway, as the light before it, has come bearing gifts. A cool sweet breeze ushered in by its rending of the dark claws at my skin igniting a thousand lost memories at once; bright hot suns burning just beyond touch. I shudder from their birth.

“Here!” shouts the shadow of the doorway and I fall as a dead man from the sound. My ears have long since lost their meaning and so to be so violently attacked is both shocking and profane. Yet, though I fall back, my chains keeping me from splitting my head, the shadow lets loose with still another ejaculation.

“I’ve found another one! Bring the Marshall!!”

Language. Dancing and free. Known and yet so foreign to me after so many bucket-leaving and bucket-returnings. I scarce know how to respond to this apparition.

Clacking. Steel on stone. I have heard this enough in my time to know it. It grows in fierceness and complexity. The doorway and its light grows dark again, but this time it is from crowding shadows. The dying light pierces my heart, but the shadows persist.

“Here now,” one of the black blobs says in a commanding tone, “can you speak sir?”

The monsters cannot contain themselves any longer. The light of the doorway had relegated them to the dark of the corners but now they brave it, smoking and burning as they do, for they see their prize slipping.

“It is your jailers, come to finish you!” one squeals, curling its tentacles around the chains to creep towards me, collapsing eyes pouring puss and ichor.

“Our masters have come to take you,” says another, row upon row of teeth glinting hungrily.

“No, its the devil and his minions! Flee! Flee!” says a third, taking flight up the hole for the bucket, which I can now see.

“Sir,” one of the shadows says again, stepping toward me, into my cell, “sir, can you speak? Alphonz! Get some light in here!” it yells.

“Here sir,” another says, glowing light blossoming from somewhere within it and flying across the cell to spread itself haphazardly.

I cannot remember when I have seen so much.

The sticks of illumination the shadow threw shed a soft green light. By it I can now see that the shadow before me is no shadow, but a man. Only he is not just a man. He is a conquistador. A god among men. A warrior-poet, commander of legions. His bladed helm gleams in the light, his breastplate reflecting me as an amorphous blob. His arms armored but free moving; his legs as well.

It is his boots that tell his tale. His boots are dented, tarnished, nicked in a hundred places. They are boots of a man who has seen much, traveled far, and destroyed many. The boots of a savior. Or executioner.

His face, still shadowed by his helm, remains a mystery. I cannot judge his intentions.

Words seem foreign. My lips, lazy with disuse, have trouble forming them.

“I…. I can speak,” I try.

The conquistador kneels at my side. I can smell war on his clothes.

“Your captors fled days ago. Monsters. They knew we were coming it seems. How long have you been here?”

“I…do not know,” I say, tongue fumbling each word.

“No matter, we will learn that soon enough.” He claps a strong hand onto my shoulder and smiles at me, trimmed goatee rising as thought saluting me. “You are a free man, sir.”

Tears bubble from my eyes. I reach to wipe them away and the chains pull at my hands, feebly clutching to their fading power over me.

“Delnachio!” the conquistador says over his shoulder to one of the shadows in the door, “cut these chains off this man at once. He comes with us.”

A shadow steps forward and soon I go with them.

But the chains remain behind.