Blinding & Binding

On Bleeding

TW: Descriptive Violence!!

I woke to the urgent pain searing the darkness of my visions into my eyelids. The ground was cold and soaking wet. The air had become increasingly more petrified with the musky smell of putrid sea sweat now that I had been locked away under the deck for all that I could assume was a week.

I had only seen Agamemnon once more. He paid me no mind as he passed by to visit another one of his helpless prisoners. Though many would assume that the times when we were left alone would be a comforting heaven to our crackled end, it must be known that it was nothing but that.

Their screams rattled inside of my head as though they would forever be locked away in there as a punishing memory. The very thought of it made my throat collapse and the entirety of my body convulse as I tried to escape the hallowed and agonising screams. It ached. When we did not scream, our spirits still suffered the torment. Whimpers haunted the bars that contained us animals.

As the journey progressed, and Agamemnon's visits underneath the deck became more sparse, my only human contact came from the various rough faces of the Greeks.

There were so many of them, but their faces. They were all the same. They were all far from pleasant.

Teeth yellowed and crooked poked into their swollen lips as they smiled and their ripped garments hung loosely around their dirty figures. They smelt awful and looked even worse.

They probably looked better than me, though. I knew that they definitely smelled better than me.

Each of them took their turns to taunt me, humiliate me, and rattle my soul until I was left shivering in the far corner scratching desperately at the wall hoping that with one final pull downwards the walls would come caving in, ending my misery.

Unfortunately, that was not going to happen, and so there I sat cramped in my cell, rotting in my own putrid sweat and drinking in the agonising screams of the captives surrounding me.

They reminded me of the agonising and brutal screams of terror that had melted themselves into my ears from the night I was dragged from my temple, the place that was to be my place of refuge away from the war and with the god that I had devoted my life to serving. I felt my eyes ache from the lack of sleep, for I feared that if I let myself succumb to my unconsciousness I would only be met with the destruction that had burned itself onto my eyelids.

There had been nothing I could do to stop it. The only way I knew how was a joke and if that were not punishment enough, a cold breath harshly broke against my bare feet.

I wanted to blame it on the quaking floorboards beneath me and the icy ring of shackles that grappled at my veins, piercing them with a burning numbness. I blamed the cold on the crashing waves that disrupted any sleep I tried to succumb to. I blamed it on the screams and whimpers that cursed the barren air. And I let it consume me one last time.

"Up," a gruff voice pulled me from the depths of my disastrous mind. It was another soldier, face square, hair knotted, and teeth yellowing with specks of rotting food twisted in and out as if he were knitting a sweater of leftovers with his tongue. I tried not to show my disgust.

He pulled at my arm, not caring if he was reopening the burns that had begun to ooze with a thick yellowish green liquid. The man then shackled my hands and legs together before walking me out of the cell and up the ladder onto the slippery deck above.

The sunlight pierced my eyes as soon as I stepped foot above the deck. I felt my legs buckle and my face met the rough, wooden floorboards. They were mouldy and looked as though they could use a good sanding job.