SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Esmond couldn't answer.

He turned his neck, slow and stiff, to find the source of the voice, and met the eyes looking down at him. Dark blue, deep, going down and down with no bottom to catch on, and for a moment he forgot the room and the straps and his own fear and very nearly fell into them.

Then his mouth moved. He was trying to speak. It took several attempts, his throat dragging on nothing, before anything came, and when it did it came out as the ruin of a voice, cracked and scraping.

"Water. Water, please."

Trafalgar glanced at Caelum, and Caelum was already moving, bringing a cup to the man's lips. Esmond drank like his life hung on it, throat working, water running down his chin, and didn't stop until it was drawn away.

It was no strange thing to do. A man wakes with no idea where he is, or what became of him, or how he came to be strapped to a bed with two people standing over him, and a single mouthful of water becomes the one certain thing in the world.

And these were not two strangers. These were two of the last faces he had seen before the dark took him.

For all Esmond knew, the whole of it had been a dream, and he was only now surfacing out of Aurevane, which meant it all sat fresh and raw at the front of his mind. The last battle, the night everything came down around him, the end of the life he had built after he made the thing he called, even now, his masterpiece. And even now, ruined and bound and robbed of two years he would never get back, some buried part of him reached back toward that work with something near to pride. It was the one thing in a long and ugly life he had never once wished undone.

He had gone from under the heel of the Vaelion to under the heel of the Morgain. His escape had worked, in the narrow sense that he'd got out. Whether it had been a clever thing to do was a question the room around him answered plainly enough, and his head spun trying to hold all of it at once.

He didn't know where he was. He was afraid, and it showed, in eyes that trembled in their sockets and the sweat starting cold across his brow.

Neither of the men said a word. They only watched, and let him arrive at the size of his own situation by himself.

"Where..." His voice caught, tried again. "Where am I."

"Somewhere in the world that no one knows of but Caelum and myself, where no one will ever hear you, where you'll never learn the day, or how long you've been in it, or how much you have left." Trafalgar's tone was almost conversational. "Which strikes me as about right, for a man like you."

Esmond turned his neck again, and this time his gaze fell on Caelum's hand, and on the small collection of things laid out on the table beside it. Something moved through him, a jolt of recognition threaded through with the fear. He knew those things. Or he knew enough of them to be afraid.

Both men caught it. Trafalgar saw the recognition break across his face, and so did Caelum, and the two traded the briefest glance over the bed.

"So you know what he's holding." Trafalgar didn't sound displeased. "Nice. That saves us both a great deal of time." He turned one of the pieces on the table with a finger, unhurried. "You've no idea the trouble these have put me to. Someone walked into a Morgain mine, two thousand of our people died in the dark under our own ground, and a great deal followed that I won't bore you with. You honestly can't picture the half of it."

Esmond listened, because there was nothing else left for him to do. His body would not answer him. No mana rose when he reached for it, none at all. For a man who had spent a lifetime bending mana to his will, feeding it, coaxing it into doing things it was never meant to do, to feel none of it now was a hell all its own, a limb gone where he could still feel the absence of it.

He didn't understand what had been done to him, only that a thing had been. He was a clever man, though, cleverer than most who had ever held a knife over him, and the answer wasn't hard to find. Caelum had worked something into him. And whatever it was, it was the reason he lay here unable to flex his own will, let alone his hands.

He was trapped. Not only unable to escape, but unable even to dream of escape the way a man dreams of the impossible to keep himself sane. Some part of him had already lain down and quit.

But he was still breathing, and men like the one standing over him did not keep a body breathing for two years out of mercy. They had a use for him. He knew that much, and it was the one thread keeping the last of his mind from tearing loose.

There was another question under all of it, though, and after a moment he made himself ask.

"How..." The word rasped, torn, the water having done little for a voice two years unused. "How long. How long has it been."

"Two," Trafalgar said, and nothing more.

Esmond's mind reached for the smallest number it could bear. "Two weeks?"

"No."

"...Two months?"

"Two years. To be exact." Trafalgar let it hang there in the cold. "It's a miserable thing, isn't it, not knowing how the time slips past you. Makes me wonder whether you'd have been better off in Vaelion hands after all. But here we are."

The number struck him harder than all the rest of it together. Two years. Gone, wholly and without a trace, lifted out of him while he lay in the dark and knew nothing of it.

If the Vaelion had spent those years hurting him, that would have been a horror of its own, but at least he'd have been there for it, alive inside his own life. This was worse in a way he couldn't find words for. Two years of everything he might have done and everything he might have made, simply erased, and no one to blame for the theft but himself and the sins that had put him on this table. It was, he understood with a dull and total certainty, no more than he had earned.

"Right." Whatever patience there had been in Trafalgar folded away. "Let's not waste any more of the time you're so worried about. Tell me what they are." He nodded at the pieces on the table, at the recognition sitting raw in the man's eyes. "And don't insult either of us by pretending you don't know. I watched your face the second you saw them."

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