The Cell (Thursday Prompt/Warmup)
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A warm-up writing done as part of the Thursday Prompt
hosted by Poetigress's on Furaffinity.
http://www.furaffinity.net/user/poetigress
The Thursday Prompt is switching hands to Duroc as of 2012.
If you're interested, be sure to visit when he starts up in February ^^.
http://www.furaffinity.net/user/duroc
Since this is only a warmup, it's not very long, and much of the remaining
story is implied rather than written. One of my favorite short-story techniques.
Hopefully you guys enjoy it.
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The night had never seemed so cold; so dark. Trees had never made such frightening noises; screeching as the wind roared past their skeletal branches. An autumn storm thundered through the sky. The rain came down hard, and cold.
A small figure lay below a window in a room filled with shadows. The same window was also the source of the only light that shone into his darkened place of restlessness, punctuated by a small set of bars built into the heavy wooden door that kept him from the world beyond. The small room hummed with the sound of the storm outside, and the constant patter of the rain slipping in through the old, cracked roof; amplified and echoed by the cold stone walls.
"It is time." Came a gruff voice from the outside.
The music of the world outside suddenly sounded so quiet to the wolf that lay curled against the unforgiving and cold corners of the cell. The loud report of the locks and latches being removed from the heavy door put a sudden feeling of emptiness into his heart.
Two more wolves entered the room and silently hauled him to his feet. They led him out of the cell, and down a corridor. The light in the hall was blinding after having been in solitary darkness for longer than he could remember.
He was led outside - a place which seemed almost familiar to him, in the most primal sense. The ground beneath their feet was a shining sea of fire; alive with the colors of Autumn. The bitter wind felt warm to the prisoner, and the rain quickly matted his fur, which almost felt new to him. His skin drank the water of the rain, and a feeling he'd forgotten the words to describe washed over him.
Ephemerae. Just as taste, smell, or sound would be. The cloud of senses that flooded the prisoner's mind vanished as he was led into another darkened room, where he was left to kneel on what he could only guess was dirt. Before him sat a group of figures that seemed dauntingly large. They were only visible through the poor light falling down from what appeared to be a hole in the roof. The prisoner winced as he was shoved farther foreword onto all fours. It occurred to him that there must have been a hole in the ceiling as he again felt the rain against his fur.
Suddenly the feeling was so much less pleasant than before. The difference was shocking to him. Now, instead of the wonderful and indescribable thoughts that had flooded his mind before, he was confronted with a very familiar feeling of fear. Pain. Suffering...
The tears came. Hot and fast. The weight of worry, and the fear that had kept him huddled into the corner of his cell came back in a rush that nearly caused him to collapse, huddling into himself once again. He had withered away in that rotting cell for so long that the redundancy had nearly forced the purpose of his imprisonment from his mind.
The tallest of the figures sitting before him gestured with one enormous hand, and the wolf could feel the attention of all of the figures before him shift onto him, their blank stares boring through his flesh. The figure raised his other enormous hand to show a large, canine skull. The intensity of the stares seemed to physically strengthen.