Every two days, someone brushed aside the earth covering his mouth and poured a cup of water onto his lips. Kaden lapped at it greedily, even going so far as to suck at the moist soil when the water was gone, a decision he always bitterly regretted when, hours later, he found his mouth plagued with grit that he could not spit out. He managed to tumble into a few hours of sleep late each night, when the monks had retired to their cells and the central square was still, but even his sleep was dogged by dreams of captivity and crushing confinement, and he woke haggard and exhausted each morning to find his nightmares real.
By the end of the first day, he thought he might go insane. By the fourth, he found himself hallucinating about water and freedom—vivid waking visions in which he splashed and danced in one of the cool mountain streams, whirling his arms and kicking his legs like a madman, slurping up great gulps of water, and sucking in endless breaths of clean, uncluttered air. When the monks came with his water, he found it difficult to tell if they were real or not, and stared the way one might at an apparition or a ghost.
On the eighth day, he woke to a cold dawn, the sky gray as slate, the light of the sun faint and watery over the eastern peaks. Several monks were up and about their morning ablutions, moving across the square, the only sound their bare feet crunching on the gravel of the paths. For a few heartbeats Kaden’s mind moved with a clean clarity he thought he had lost days before. Tan will leave me here, he realized. He will leave me here forever if I don’t learn what he wants me to learn. The thought should have filled him with desperation, but thoughts had lost all urgency. He felt as though reality was slipping from his grasp, and since his reality was a coffin of hard rock and unyielding soil, he was happy to let it go. After all, Kaden could suffer, but if Kaden wasn’t there, there was no suffering.
For a while he watched a thin white cloud, light as air and impossibly far away. When it scudded beyond the range of his vision, he looked instead into the wide gray blank of the sky. The empty sky, he thought idly to himself. A heaven of nothingness. Without that space, the cloud could not sail past. Without it, the stars could not turn in their orbits. Without that great emptiness, the trees would wither, the light dim, while the men and beasts walking and crawling over the earth, moving effortlessly through the great void of the heavens, suffocated under an unfathomable weight, just as he, now, was slowly suffocating. Kaden stared into the sky until he felt he might fall upward, plummeting away from the earth into the bottomless gray, dwindling to a thin point, then to nothing.
Two days later, Tan broke him from his daze. Kaden hadn’t seen his umial since the penance began, and he raised his eyes in perplexity, trying to make some sense of the robed figure above him.
“How do you feel?” the monk asked after a long silence, squatting down to scoop away the dirt covering Kaden’s mouth.
Kaden considered the question, revolving it in his mind like a strange, smooth stone. Feel. He knew what the word meant, but had forgotten how to connect it to himself. “I don’t know,” he replied.
“Are you angry?”
Kaden moved his head slightly in the negative. It occurred to him that he had reason to be angry, but his imprisonment was a fact. The earth around him was a fact. Thirst was a fact. It made no sense to be angry at facts.
“I could leave you here until the new moon.”
The new moon. Kaden had watched the moon each night, watched as the passage of time pared away sliver after lucent sliver. It was gibbous now, just fuller than half. The new moon was still a week off. Days earlier, the thought would have filled him with dread, but he could no longer muster the strength for dread. He could not even muster the strength to respond.
“Are you ready for me to dig you out?” Tan pressed.
Kaden stared at the man, at the puckered scars running down the sides of his scalp. Where did he get those scars? he wondered idly. Everything about the monk was a mystery. There was no point trying to guess the right answer to the question. Tan would release him or he would not, according to whatever arcane thoughts goverened his mood.
“I don’t know,” Kaden replied, his voice raw and ragged in his throat.
The older monk considered him for a while longer, then nodded.
“Good,” he said, then gestured to Akiil. “Dig,” he added, gesturing to the earth around Kaden.
The sensation was strange and unsettling at first. As the pressing weight that had held him, had crushed him, for so many days began to disappear, he felt as though he were falling, endlessly falling. As the gravel crunched beneath the steel, Kaden felt something trickle back into him: thoughts, he realized. Emotions.
“You’re letting me out?”
“It would have been better to leave you in another week,” Tan replied, “but circumstances have changed.”
Kaden squinted, trying to make sense of the words. “Circumstances?” The earth was packed around him. The sky spread above him. The sun carved its ineluctable arc through the blue. Those were the circumstances. What could have changed?
A cloud passed in front of the sun, casting the monk’s face into deep shadow.
“I’d leave you here longer, but it’s no longer safe.”