Xangu Basin (ｓＥｓｓｉｏｎ01): Prison Camps

[Gum]

For her, the sky was a new burden; its vast capacity for dreams shackled, recessed by a dulling curtain of rainclouds. Wire, coiled and barbed, leered down from sandstone blocks stacked into prison walls. At the base of the structure, the girl stood. She was barefoot and sinking in the sodden morass; and so too were the stones, the heart of that wild place lashed back at civilisation with miring subsidence.

"Oykot?" Her famined frame, less than a swirl in muddy dress, fell against the fortification. All she had, the brittle remnants of normality, shattered on the insurmountable divide. The innocent umber of her palms scratched the mossy grain. With a fingernail, she could carve divots, but she hadn't the lifetime to get through to the other side.

He was inside the walls, she was outside the walls. Denying her, holding his thoughts in his heart, would spare them both the dread of consequences. To pin back the desperation of their passion jarred as a paradox, and so he called back to her with spittle and strain, "I'm here, it's Oykot! Naixa, don't stay here! You've got to go, you've got to get out of here!"

"Why did they take you away?" she screamed back, her ankles swallowed by the slop. Naixa beat at the wall, lesions opened along the edge of her fists. Blood spread over the damp grit.

"I stole something, Naixa" The ruined boy fidgeted at the foot of the enclosure, unable to withstand the drowning absence of hope. "I took some food from the plantation," he whimpered, his voice cracking, the contradiction of pride and shame seeped through their division and weighed on Naixa's heart. Had his been the only empty gut, then he would have found a solution at the end of the rope, but Oykot rebelled only to feed his wife and their children.

Occupation came as the turbulence of a storm; and yet, resistance was clear in the placid morning pools. Marauding expansion cleared forest and erected prisons along the periphery of the Xangu Basin. Bloody eyed conquest drove their ravenous colonial expansion, slave labour and rich earth made settlement ambrosial to the sweet tooth of their ruling class. Felled trunks were stacked aside, ready for extraction. Checkered cash crops blanketed swathes of old native hunting grounds; those dear places, the trees slept through generations while kids came and grew. Together, those woods were where they watched the small free birds fly. Under the mahogany, Okyot and Naixa were sure they'd never see an end to it all, their love.

"The warden's coming! Oh gods! He's coming!" His little rabbit heart pumped a frantic beat to the tingle of his feet.

"Okyot!" she cried, "Oykot!" she screamed. And she scream again. A painful wail set the little finches to the skies.

"Run! Nothing matters when you're free. Just run!"

Naixa pulled her feet from the ground, gasping with grief. She ran, but stumbled, her feet caught roots and troughs when she looked back at the shrinking prison behind her. The tree line beckoned her with the verdant lure of safety, she could be hidden in the chattering undergrowth. Yet, Oykot, left behind, anchored her agony with the hopeless of his plight.

[Gum]

"Warden in the yard."

Once. Gravel and volume came with the call.

"Warden in the yard."

Twice. Bite, hiss and venom burst from the second guard's gullet.

"Warden in the yard."

Thrice. The last voice was the worst of all, guard number three sneered pridefully his critical lack of empathy.

Every scaled guard in the yard flipped his shoulders upright and echoed the warning.

Tales of the Warden talked tall throughout the yard; "Someone dies every time he swings his sword." Thunder creaked overhead, the sky god's bleak resignation paid somber tribute to the approach of the prison's dreadful Warden. Wilting order spread through the inmate ranks under the light duress of cold drizzle. The prisoners took to their lines, ready for inspection. Like Naixa, the prisoners found themselves sinking into the soil for every second they stood still.

Oykot Lanoitome shuffled away, hoping to take a back row hiding spot; out of sight, out of malice. More boy than man, but less human than animal, the prison guards wrecked his frail will against the stone walls that trapped him. Oykot had a pinched eye, tight shut from a bruising clout to the socket. The prisoner could never run again; he limped as he went, it was his lingering reminder of their vengeful hobbling. Starved of fat, his gaunt cheeks sank into the cavity left behind by his interrogated teeth. Youth shrank from Oykot through the brutality of his captors, but old age was there to offer his emaciated torso the loose skin and protruding ribcage of an eighty year old.

The Warden came out from behind one of the administration buildings. Cell blocks, cobbled together with genocidal haste, flanked his approach. Where his prisoners only saw red bricked death and splinter board beds, to the Warden, those buildings were a proud salute to his sheer patriotism. A cadre of his favourite personnel marched with the Warden, and together, their jackboots gave the gravel walkway a military crunch.

Arriving before the listless regiment of broken men and boys, the Warden bellowed, "Well, well, well. Somebody has been communicating over the wall." His pugnacious muzzle grinned aloud with razor teeth, "I'm right, aren't I boys," to which his guards hammered back with a painful, "Yessir, Warden!"

So the Warden ran his clawed digits over the rash of scales across his cheeks. The Warden was a Drakari, he belonged to the proud Wing Caste. Patches of human skin were a sign of impurity in the Drakari bloodline, so it was with circadian duty that the Warden took a blade to the fuzzy beard that struggled to sprout from under his reptilian veneer. His caste were usually seven feet tall, he was eight. Flight came naturally to him; for others it was a discipline, not a gift. A regular supplement of human testicles, he believed, would produce vigorous scale growth and strong wing muscles.

"Ah, what's that you say?" In truth, nobody had said a word. "So there are still fifty of you left standing?" Always, the Warden knew precisely how many men continued within his walls. "At this rate, it'll be done before I can crack open all of your skulls!"

A rat twitched out the secret, "Oykat! It was Oykat, he's here next to me!" Fear jumped from body to body, jolting them, it electrified the prisoners. "Oh, god, I should have gave him up first;" that thought permeated them all, muddled hearts shuddered with a shared regret. Meanwhile, the sniveling capitulator was stricken with a different dread, garnering the Warden's draconic focus stood out as a risky tactic.

"Guards, take the snitch inside. And the talker, too. Let's show them how much we appreciate their beautiful humanity enlightening our day today!"

Clawed grips pulled the chosen ones by the armpits. Limp with resignation, their torn leather shoes frayed along the ground while they were being dragged away.

Meanwhile, the Warden had relieved his sword of its scabbard's service and opened up on a salivating diatribe, "My friends, you're all my friends, and not one of you wanted to help me today? Ah, how am I expected to respond to a child, much less an animal, when they betray me like this? Don't be afraid. Discipline will help you. Don't you mammals have an expression for your children? Spare the rod, spoil the child? That's right, isn't it? Well, I have a rod of my own." He held the razor of his steel against the weather, letting the drops split along the edge. "Now, I'm looking for a little, erm, how do you say?" he teased them, malevolence soaked his strangling pause with the horrors of anticipation, "A little convers-"

"Oo o Aoo Hh OaoA aao oa Ooo..." moans came like a spatter of feces from an incontinent bowel, the noise maker was interrupting the Warden's hissing indulgence. The sound, an unidentifiable vocalisation, was an attempt at communication by an infirm fool, old like the trees. "18781995" was tattooed on his wrist. He was a withered bag of wrinkles known more for his smell than his fading humanity. Stumbling around on the spot, he began to get tangled up in his own trousers, they'd grown loose with his recent weight loss. Bubba, who was standing next to the old man, fought back the urge to help straighten his fellow inmate, everybody was afraid of standing out in the Warden's gaze.

"By all means 18781995, tell me how you feel--right now, at this very moment, I just have to know!" The bone ridged leather of his dreadful wings quivered with restraint. "I have to know what you think about things. Or maybe I should ask you about the shit stains between your legs, how about that?" At seven feet tall, the dragon/human hybrid brought the implied terror of brutal authority into the realm of painful tangibility. "Step aside, I want to have a private moment here with the old man." The Warden parted the group around his feeble target. "Is there anything still working in here?" he asked as he scratched and cut the grandpa's wispy haired scalp. Blood slid down the wrinkles of the septuagenarian's wearied brow and along his bulbous nose. Red turned pink, diluted, in the drizzle.

Even for a Drakari Imperial, the prison's warden was stricken with the vindictive tendencies of an unbridled psychopath. "Let's check!" The Warden reared tall and bludgeoned the edge of his blade into the old man's head. The victim's tongue pushed forward like a baby's, drool dripped down his lip, and then he stumbled to the floor. "I've jammed the blade in his skull, you see?" He spoke like a biologist detailing a dissection, but the explanation was hardly necessary. The inmates looked away. Even some of the guards looked away. The Warden, though, bit his lower lip and slurped his saliva. "Let me, just, here." The Warden wedged the weapon left and right to widen the crack in the skull, revealing the brain inside. Poor, dying, but not dead, 18781995 writhed on the floor while his lungs pumped helplessly at the dank mist hovering over the prison yard ground.

Oykot's neck twisted against his better judgment, he was able to see the spurt of blood from the Warden's strike on the old man. That was the last thing Oykot saw before he was dragged inside. In that moment, he had to wonder if he was going to receive the same treatment as the old man. The truth, he feared, was that his fate was to be much worse.

As the old timer's muddled sentience faded into the afterlife, he was visited by the serenity of the forest outside of the prison walls. For all the pain and violence at his feet, he could only hear the present chirping of forest finches, and under that was the lulling rush of a running stream. Freed from the yoke of another tomorrow, 18781995's wavering soul was able to sense what was still out there in the world. The living looked at the man as his eyes turned to glass, and they envied him. The living envied the dead. They could not hear the sounds for the noise of their infinite suffering.

[Gum]

Naixa bowed against the hard plain of her torment; she was a weeping willow, lurching over the salt stained ridge of her gloom. Beneath the cliff, the mild wash of the land's end tempered her explosive mood and urged her into a pacific melancholy. In the Dheathain twilight, the stars emerged as diamonds reflecting in the distant swell. There, she saw her favourite thing, a falling star; she watched that star set in the ocean while the prison ship sailed out across the bay. Upon that ship, she was certain, was Oykot; her suffering beloved had been sentenced to deadly labour. For the empire of the Drakari was built with the slaves of their conquest, their roads were laid with the bones of the sacred and their cement was mixed with the blood of the Xangu.

Ahead on her way, the uncertainty of occupation loomed at the bereaved woman. Would their children, she wondered, live a life worth living under the jackboot of the Drakari Empire. Midnight could bring her the alarm of soldiers at the door, papers in hand to order away the wife of a known rebel; she could join the disappeared. What contentedness was left to seek in a land dominated by cruel dragons. And then, when the ship sparkled over the horizon, a cold bullet cut into her bitter heart. Oykot was gone, he was gone forever.

Meanwhile, Oykot was jostling his wrists against the wringing rub of iron shackles. He was joined to the man next to him, and those shackles were joined again, but not to another soul, instead they were latched securely onto the deck beneath them. The hold was packed to the point of insufferability. Many of the men, sardined against each other, would expire during the journey. The sweat, piss and shit made the smell unbearable. Rocking in the water, the boat's sickly sway was as inescapable as the corpses that went unattended. But the light, oh the light, it came through cracks above and reminded the slaves that freedom was all around them, but not a drop to drink. Again, for the sake of cruelty and conquest—the poison of consumption, life found a way to envy death.

Ahead on his way, Oykot faced true certainty. Rumours of the Drakari labour camps were entertaining currency among rebels like Oykot. Supposedly, the work camps were hidden around the remotest regions of Dheathain. Mountains, rivers and ocean were the walls of those places. Knowing that meant that Oykot also knew that this was the end of his line. Hard labour would kill him, as sure as the moon would chase the sun. Of his wife and children, he knew nothing, and he would never know anything again. Even in the agony of restraints, he understood that the real pain was not that moment's, nor was it the future's toil. Every minute left to live would draw out ahead of him, a long and straight road, and every footstep he had to take, he would take with the ignorance of his family's fortune.

Naixa and Oykot, theirs was just one beat of heartache in the Drakari's swollen dominion of sorrow. Althanas had to concede, it was an evil world, with sparse sentiment for the persecuted. Gum was the Xangu's last hope, he had set sail for civilisation, intending to seek the aid of foreign nations.

[Philomel]

Name Of Judgement: Xangu Basin (ｓＥｓｓｉｏｎ01): Prison Camps
Judgement Type: Workshop Submission

Rewards:

Gum receives:
280 EXP
80 GP

Rewarded with judge's discretion.
Converted max EXP into GP as per request.

Also no icecream.

[Shinsou Vaan Osiris]

All rewards added!