Claustrophobia

Author's Note: A short one-shot for a role play game set in the world of Arcanum. Celos the elf is trapped in the dungeons of Moorindal and goes a little...mad. (See if you can find the C.S. Lewis "Silver Chair" reference).




She watches the cold stone walls, growing more certain with each passing moment that they are growing inexorably closer, soon to crush her in a slow, but fatal embrace.

The ceiling and floor are no better and, after the first few hours, she forces herself not to look at them anymore.

The rational fortress of her mind tells her she is ‘being silly’. Logically, these walls can’t be doing any such thing. Logically, there’s no way anyone would leave her here to rot. People just don’t do that.

But these aren’t her people and even the most implacable of fortresses crumbles when imprisoned, with no hope of escape, deep beneath the ground.

Like a dead thing.

Trapped.

The ‘day’ inches onward and time would lose all meaning were it not for the small tap on the door every two hours. The tap of salvation that her pride refuses to acknowledge-

“I’m going to die here.”

-the tap that could set her free.

After awhile, reality breaks down completely.

Suppose she had always been here, in this room? Suppose that the other hundred odd years of her life had been little more than a whimsical dream?

The sun, for example. How could a big flaming ball hang in the sky like that? What would support it? Surely she had just imagined it; thinking of the candle in her little prison; imagining it to be much, much bigger.

Or the moon? Was there ever a moon?

Or her village and her people? So silly not to tell the tap at her door about them if
they never existed in the first place, right?

But, no. It was always at that point that the small, quiet spark of her sanity would burn bright. She wouldn’t make a promise to something that didn’t exist. Her people were real, even if they were so far as to almost be dead to her, now.

But that didn’t make the waiting easier.

Didn’t make the walls recede.

Didn’t stop the ceiling from lowering to meet the floor and crush her head.

Didn’t stop the darkness.

Nothing stopped the darkness.