Chapter 1
The smell of sulfur and ash woke him up with a start. Bryggen did not know how long he had been asleep. He was surprised he was able to get any sleep at all, considering his circumstances. He forced open his tear-streaked eyes and took in his surroundings.
He was on the precipice of an enormous crater sunken into the earth. Great stone cliffs lined the entire perimeter of the crater. From what Bryggen could make out, there was no discernible way of climbing the cliff walls. The crater had a foreboding feeling, giving Bryggen the distinct impression that escape was impossible. The thought made him start silently crying again.
Inside the bowl of the crater, there was a thick, dark fog covering the bottom. The fog was constantly in motion, bubbling and swirling as if it were a living thing. In several places, the fog disappeared into deep fissures in the earth. In other places, the fog was interrupted by flaming pyres of molten ash. The way the fog curled inside the fissures made it look like the land was drinking it in. The pyres, on the other hand, spewed ash and smoke into the air abruptly and sporadically, giving Bryggen the impression that the land was spitting the poisonous fog out. The contrast made Bryggen’s imagination wander.
Bryggen only saw one way into the hellscape and that was through a small, winding path that started at the southern edge of the crater, where the group now sat, and descended along the crater’s edge towards the northeast.
The sight of it sent a shiver through his bones. He shut his eyes, heavy with exhaustion, and shifted uncomfortably in the shackles tightly woven around his feet and hands. Out of habit, he fiddled with the ring on his left hand.
The shackles were unlike anything he had ever seen before. They were made from a group of long, sinewy strands of silver metal. The color and reflection of the metal strands, combined with the tightly woven patter, gave the shackles the appearance of liquid metal. They were cold to the touch and chaffed his skin. Several times over the past few days, Bryggen had attempted to yank his hands free of the shackles. However, with each attempt, they reacted to his efforts by tightening around his hands so much that he thought the force would take his hands off entirely. Each time, the pain of the experience caused him to black out.
Bryggen lay bound next to a dozen other people from his homeland, his girlfriend Mya included. He could hear some of them softly crying. Others smelled of excrement and filth—undoubtedly their own. He was surprised he hadn’t done the same. Bryggen wished he could make out Mya’s body among the muddle of bodies, but the cramped quarters prevented it.
Bryggen did not know how long they had been prisoners. He had lost track of time as the caravan left his homeland and made its way towards this crater. His captors kept them in a cage of bones fused together by globs of a sticky, black, tar-like substance. The smell from his comrades mixed with the smell of the dirty cage. He suppressed the urge to wretch.
The bones forming the cage were stained with dried blood. There did not seem to be any specific pattern to how the dirty bones were fused together and yet, it was still an effective cage. He couldn’t find any way through the morass of bones and tar, despite the lack of formal structure. The bones were not the worst of the cage, however. The black tar binding the bones together was possessed with some strange power. Whenever Bryggen’s flesh encountered some of it, his soul was sapped of hope, like color draining out of a painting. It left Bryggen cold, afraid, and despairing. If he touched the tar for too long, his mind was filled with dark whisperings. The experience was so unnerving that Bryggen did his best to avoid touching the stuff whenever possible.
The cage was being dragged by three beasts, each the size of a small horse. The beasts were misshapen like something had twisted them violently into knots and then wrung them out. Their mass undulated as they moved, unphased by the weight of the cage and the prisoners held inside it.
The whole ordeal was so horrifying that Bryggen couldn’t accept that this was happening to him. He feared for Mya and cursed himself for taking her into the outskirts of their town. If they had only stayed within the safety of the city, they could have avoided this nightmare.
He kept wishing this was all a bad dream that he would eventually wake up from. But the pain in his body anchored him in the despair slowly overwhelming him. The cage lurched forward and the caravan began its descent into the cavernous crater and to the doom that awaited them.
