[IC] The Last Survivor (Supine / Kote)

[Supine]

It was quiet now, Quill thought, her cheek pressed to the cool, dirty flagstones. She hadn’t heard the sound of another human being in five days. No more retching or coughing. No more crying. No gagging or screaming, or that dull sound of bodies being piled in the empty cell beside hers. Just... quiet. Occasionally she heard a mouse scurry, and sometimes a horse would snort outside, riderless. The sound startled her every time. But mostly she just heard her own raspy breath.

Quill lay sprawled across the floor of her cell, the cool stones her only comfort. Everything ached. Her head throbbed and her mouth was too dry to swallow. She hadn’t had water in three days and knew none was coming. She’d die here. Maybe in a few hours.

A week ago, when the realization that most of the city was really dead had struck, she’d begun pleading with the one man who remained at his post. Even he’d been sick, but some misplaced sense of duty had motivated him to keep walking that hall where she’d been the only living thing to guard.

“Let me out,” she’d begged. “Please. Everyone is dying. Just give me a chance to live.”

He’d only shook his head, and she could remember how he’d slid to the floor, too exhausted to stand anymore. His eyes, bloodshot, had stared through her. “Why should you live?” he’d asked. “You’re a murderer. Your execution is next week.”

God, was that today? Quill tried to count the days on her fingers. She’d kept careful track of time, watching through the little barred window set high up in the wall each time the sun set. She’d repeated the number of days she’d been imprisoned to herself, again and again, because that was the only way to keep track. She had nothing to write with. Nothing shared her little cell besides a bucket to relieve herself, stinking in the corner, and a flea-ridden blanket to throw over her shoulders at night when it got close to freezing.

Thirty days. She’d been here thirty days, and that meant today was the day of her execution. There was no one to swing the ax though. The irony amused her; the only survivor in the whole damn city, maybe in the whole damn world, was someone with a death sentence. And she was locked in, so she’d die too.

She’d tried everything to get out of that cell, both before her last guard died and after. Now she was weak from hunger, delirious from dehydration, and she could do nothing but stare out of her cell into the hall and wait for her last breath to come.

She was only nineteen, but looked ten years older now. Her cheeks and eyes sunk into her skull, filmed by pallid, waxy skin. Her hair was dirty and knotted and dull, a rat’s nest fanned out around her. She’d once been.... Well, not beautiful. She’d never been a beauty. But she’d been clean and well dressed, and she’d been so full of youthful vitality that people had sometimes mistaken her for pretty. Now she resembled a corpse. Like everyone else in the capital, she would be robbed of a dignified death. She would have rather died on the executioner’s block, where she could go kicking and screaming. She’d planned to curse everyone who’d come to see her die. She’d planned to spit in the face of the priest who came to read her last rites. She’d wanted to go out with a fight, not collapsed on the floor, so thirsty she could barely move.

“Help,” she tried to call, but her throat and mouth were too dry to make much sound. Her voice was nothing but a weak whisper. Damn it, she thought. Damn it all.

Though Quill was certain everyone was dead, she refused to give up until she met the same fate. She dragged herself to the iron bars one last time, pulling herself along the stone floor with her fingernails, pain pulsating through her head, limbs throbbing. And she pounded weakly on the door, making the metal clang against its frame.

The sound of the last survivor.

[Kote]

Lannis Tyrel
^{"...and wasn't it you who said I needed peace..."}

The only survivor.

The city was full of dead men. The putrid corpses of friends and neighbors were everywhere. At first, they had attempted burials, but quickly the need overwhelmed the able, and soon they had to settle for mass funeral pyres outside the city. Eventually, as the plague continued, even that effort became unsustainable and the bodies of the dead simply lay where they fell. Lannis was just a young man, a man grown to be sure, but in so many ways a boy still. His father had died early with the illness, and his mother soon after. He had had brothers, but through grief or some other affliction, possibly the very same that had taken the others… they had been a part of the last pyre, one that he had lit himself. Now seemed nothing lived on the city but himself, and the flies.

At first, he was too frightened to leave his home. He took the first day as though it were any other since his folks passed. He woke with the sunrise, milled grain into flour for a few hours until he had worked up an appetite for breakfast. He’d told himself that there would be survivors coming today, and he would have an ample supply of flour to sell them for their bread. It had been folly, because nobody came. The next day, he ventured outside and was immediately driven back into his home by what he saw. The bodies were everywhere. They lay in the streets, against fence posts or on the stoops of buildings. Old man Holland looked as though he slept in his hayloft, pitchfork still clasped in his hands, while the famed, drunken Ser Jorn Highwall galloped around town on a frothing mare, his limp body held in place by a thick rope tied around his waist and legs.

The days came, and the days went, and nobody came. Silence greeted him in the morning, and silence sang him its deafening lullaby at night, with the buzzing of fly’s wings the only break between, that or the sounds he made while out and about. A few days ago, he’d even taken to talking to himself, just to remember what it sounded like to hear a voice that wasn’t inside his head. With each passing day, he grew more adventurous, less concerned with the dead. A week ago, he broke into the meat shed of the butcher, where the old man was known to hang his salted hams for storage, and seeing as how the old man was dead in his bed, he felt it was ok for him to help himself. He took a ham, a wheel of cheese he found still rolled up tightly in it’s cloth, and when he returned home, milled himself some flour for bread. He borrowed books from the Church’s library, though he couldn’t read, he did enjoy looking at the illustrations, imaging just what it had all been about. Sometimes he pretended he could read, and made the story up as he went, but eventually, he grew bored with the practice, and left the books in a pile.

It was last night, while he lie away in his bed, under his new blanket he took out of the seamstress’s shop up the road, that he thought about leaving his home. The kingdom seemed to be dead, nobody has stirred this whole while, that he could see… hell, even the castle was still and quiet.

“and if the King’s dead, and all the people are dead, then by the King’s law, all lands are passed down through blood or marriage to the last survivor. Though I don’t know the whole of it, it must mean that now, I am king.. seeing as how someway, it has to all lead back to me, right?”

Nobody answered to tell him not, so he nodded to himself, affirmed in his own logic, and went to sleep that night dreaming of his new found status as a royal. The next morning he was up and dressed in a pair of new britches and a tunic of azure and crimson, fashioned in the way of the wealthy merchants. His boots were one he had found off a man a few streets over, good, quality boots. “Good enough for a king, eh?” He chuckled to himself, and before the house was turned, Lannis found himself sitting on his throne, legs crossed and the royal crown perched upon his dirty brown hair.

Emptiness forced him to abandon the throne room after only a few mock trials in which he found the mason’s boys guilt of being prats and ordered them beheaded, and he took to exploring the castle. Sadly, though not unexpectedly, Lannis found the castle in the same condition as was the city. The dead lay as they had fallen, and inspite of his royal claims, seems that only the flies ruled here. At length, his search of the castle turned up the dungeons.

He stood at the top of a dark stairway, looking down into the deep darkness, sure to himself that nobody would be left alive down there. The darkness was deep, daunting. Something about the place seemed to make the darkness more frightening, as though by virtue of it being a dungeon, the darkness was possessed with some otherworldly abilities. The chill it gave him was nonsense, and to prove it to himself, Lannis took down the curved stairwell into the darkness.

Lannis stopped when he heard the noise, the first unnatural noise he had heard in weeks, at least, the first he hadn’t made himself. Fears forgotten, concern forgotten, Lannis raced down the remainder of stairs towards the noise. It wasn’t until he was halfway down a corridor lined with heavy wooden door set with iron bars, that he even though to call out. When he did, his voice was loud, excited.

“Is someone there!?” he called, looking around him, hearing his voice echo on the emptiness of the cells. This was a terrible place, cold and dark. How someone could be here, Lannis had no idea. Alone, with nothing but iron and wood. It would have driven Lannis mad. But it didn’t matter to him. He could only hope that he had heard what he thought he’d heard, a survivor like himself.

“Please, are you there?” He called out again.

[Supine]

This wasn't how it was supposed to end, thought Quill. Her head was full of a dull buzzing, and even though she'd pillowed her sunken cheek on her arm, the world spun around her again and again and again. Still, her fingers gripped the underside of the door, pulling on it over and over to make it clank, metal-to-metal, against the frame. Relentless. She'd always been relentless. The sound would be her final act. She'd leave the dead, empty world, the last human to make a sound. Clank, clank, clank.

Her eyes closed. Sleep would overcome her soon, though she fought it. She'd die in her sleep--one of the few peaceful moments of her life.

A sound snapped her out of her buzzing stupor. Quill's head lifted inches off her arm from where she was sprawled on the cold, dirty floor. It was all she could manage. Had she imagined the sound? She listened hard and heard nothing. And then--there it was again.

"Please, are you there?"

Someone was in the hallway. Her heart jolted in surprise. She'd been so sure she was the last one left and that she'd die there, locked in her cell with no way to escape. But no, she was wrong. Maybe only those in the castle had died! Maybe there was life out there still! And someone was in the dungeon, a man, and he could save her, perhaps. Maybe he'd free her. Maybe he'd take pity. Quill clanged the door harder, trying to draw him nearer. She tried to speak, but only a rasp came out, barely audible even to her own ears.

If he finds out why I'm here, he'll never help me, Quill realized. Society reviled murderers, regardless of the circumstances, and the Duke had been beloved. He'd given money to the needy, visited monasteries, and charmed the lords and ladies of the court. If whoever was down there learned who she was, he'd gladly leave her there to die.

So I'll become someone new, she decided. She'd shake off her identity, much as she'd shake off the dust and dirt covering her, and she'd be reborn as someone new.

"I'm here," she tried to call, but her mouth was so dry the words made her cough. Still, she didn't give up. "I'm alive!"

[Kote]

Lannis Tyrel
^{"...and wasn't it you who said I needed peace..."}

It was her sounds, more than it was her voice, that alerted him to her presence; the heavy metallic sound of the door catching, and the rasping cough, drew him. Quickly, his eyes scanned around the room, finding pitched torches standing unused in a corner of the room, but the brazier that had been with them was out, as cold as though it had never been lit. The corridor was dark, and little to no light fell into the prison from outside sources. She was ensconced in darkness darker than night, and stepping into that gave Lannis a chill as though the touch of the dead had brushed the back of his neck.

“I hear you, I’m coming,” He spoke, without thought of who this person was, or why they had been put into this place in the first place. His excitement at finding someone alive overrode all other sense of self preservation and caution. He simply didn’t think whomever it was would actually attempt to hurt him. The trouble was, he couldn’t see. The sounds told him that the door was locked, and Lannis didn’t have a set of jailer’s keys, or know where to look for one.

“Keeper rattling the door,” He spoke, wanting to use the sound as a guide, while his eyes groped the darkness immediately around him, in search of either a source of light, or a set of keys, or anything useful. A few steps and his foot kicked up against a hard wooden surface, and his groping hands gave the impression of a flat topped desk or table of some sort. He felt parchments, the feel of melted wax long dried. His fingers stained as he knocked over an ink well, but he gave it all no mind, failing to feel anything metallic that could be used to strike to light one of the torches, or anything he could use for the door.

“Do you know where the keys are… or where the jailer lives? Perhaps he has them on him?” Lannis was thinking aloud now, unsure if the prisoner could even hear him, unsure if they could even talk, and in truth, he doubted the reality of their existence. Perhaps the whole thing was his mind’s trick on him, like the way he thought he saw old man Potter blink before he took that silver crown out from beneath the set of towels on the counter a few days ago. He didn’t know if the money would be useful anymore, but he figured he’d have more use of it than the old man.

[Supine]

Quill wedged her fingers beneath the bars of the door, grasping for freedom she couldn't reach. It was so close now... She realized that the air inside her dirty cell was suffocating her, and she needed the air out in that corridor where another survivor walked, rifling through things, making sounds. She needed that cool, clean air.

He asked where the keys were and her eyes shut, squeezing, pinching closed.

"No...."

She had no idea.

"They always... There was always a guard with--" She stopped, trying to swallow and clear her throat. He needed to hear her, but her voice was so weak. "--with keys... on a ring. A large ring... They must leave it here," she reasoned. "Surely they don't take it home. Please," she pleaded. "Please find it. Get me out of here. I haven't... water...."

She lowered her cheek back down to the dirty stones, exhausted from speaking. Everything ached, yet this was her chance. Her entire life rested in the hands of the man on the other side of her cell. "Don't let me die here."