Insatiable Appetite

That morning, breakfast consisted of a hot cattle prod and a steel-toed boot to the gut. In your already-weakened state, this is enough to send you back to sleep again. You awaken to more darkness and an inexplicable inability to move. A rough, scratchy surface seems to be covering your face and head, and your arms are bound behind your back by a length of metallic cord wrapped around your mid-torso. For added measure, your ankles have been manacled together with only enough slack to take little baby steps. A gruff voice commands you to get up and walk, and you feel something grab your arms. You’re pushed a step or two forward and the ground disappears from beneath your feet. Your stomach leaps into your chest as you plummet through the air, and a moment later your feet smack painfully onto some gravel. You’re marched along by whatever is guiding you, and the crunching rock soon turns into a long trek over soft ground. Every so often, you feel something supple and stringy lashing out across your face, but you can’t see what it is. Your gut is soon groaning from lack of breakfast, and aches so much from what feels like a threat of implosion that you even begin to feel faint. When you stumble, your arms are wrenched upwards with the threat of removing them from their sockets. As the long march continues on through unseen terrain, you feel accordingly more convinced the destination is somewhere quite unpleasant.

After a long while, you haven’t felt anything brushing across your face, and you sense a strange, disturbing warmth all upon you. You almost think you can see through the black fabric, but there aren’t any shapes to make out beyond the veil. You almost stop to marvel at this weird heat, but before you can panic, whatever has a hold of you lurches you forward with a brusque gesture and you continue onward in futile silence. That silence is eventually broken with a quiet albeit gruff command: “Knees.” After a second, it repeats, angrier. “Get on your knees!” Whether you want to comply or not, you’re onto your knees on the irritating ground. With a frizzle of static, the hood is removed from you, and you have to squint in revulsion at the glaring sunlight that oppresses your vision. You can make out a barren-looking wood surrounding a muddy, foreboding marsh. A vast lake of mud stretches out before you for what appears to be miles.

You have little time to take in the scenery. A uniformed man stoops beside you and seizes the back of your head, painfully jerking it backwards to gaze up into his face, which is as ugly as the beatings are long. He looks to be near-human but with gray scales bordering his face, and lateral ridges across his forehead. His eyes seethe at you, his worn expression one of utmost loathing. You recognize this man as participating in your daily beatings over the course of the past five years. “Now listen carefully, you savage phlegm-bag. This is your last chance to tell me what I wanna know.”