Lil Vigaj - (The Madness. Prison of Ethgan'tor)

[Peach]

Cold air, laced with the icy touch of demise and destruction, seeped readily from the gaping hole in the cobblestones. It was blocked off by a metal door, a grille allowing the tiniest shaft of light inside. The entrance itself was positioned far away from the outskirts of the city, in the edges of the fields that surrounded it. No one ever saw it, rearing above them, casting an ominous shadow over the beautiful stone spires. For it was completely underground, in caverns and caves thousands of years old, where no natural sun had ever set its rays. Its location was symbolic, perhaps. One could say that the villainous people thrown in were worthy only of being Vysstichi, the worms that crawled in the dirt, crippled by the very thing that gave every other race life. Its very presence in the air would contaminate the city, its noxious fumes of evil leaking out an effecting every sane mind. None but the strongest of heart could look directly at it and not tremble at the thought of what horrors took place there. What mad men were trapped underneath their very feet.

The conditions inside were, at the most, dismal and depressing. A long stairwell, hewn roughly out of black stone, wound its way down until it faded into the darkness, the mire of inevitable consequence and dooms day punishment. The vision of these stairs haunted the nightmares of so many an Eshla’heir, taking that last long walk into the death of their soul. Every now and then, a mournful cry echoed upwards, ringing in the ears of those who dared to enter. Or those who were forced to against the will the had so easily been snatched from them. Mostly, the prisoners had lost their voices. Lost the heart to care whether or not they would ever escape the caverns, to dream of what they had once sought in their lives. Money, power, satisfaction. These words were never once uttered. To do so was to break the unwritten code that had stood for so many a century. The thing that bound the people to the starless night, without a ray of hope to guide them to their futures. They were truly desolate, forgotten, made to believe that they were no longer alive.

At the end of the treacherous steps, the enormous jail extended into nothingness. There were individual cells with bars of iron, for the lucky patrons, but mostly the prisoners were simply chained to a peg hammered into the solid stone mortar. Many had escaped their chains and set off to wander, oftentimes never finding a single other breathing being during their long and lonely lives. Skeletons hung from their shackles, the keeper of the keys never bothering to clear away the bones of the deceased. Their bare mouths grinned, blank eye sockets stared, always searching for something besides the heavy curtains of anguish that fell before them. Smiling that Jalat had finally ended their sentence, freed them into the eternal happiness of whichever afterlife they were assigned. For anything was better than where they had lived. The Aeternia on Telath, the secret never spoken, the face not forgotten.

There was only one being who was allowed to return to the surface. Not that he ever did. The nameless abomination, Half Vysstichi-half Esh’laheir, cast away from his mother before he was weaned. No one knew how long he had been down there. Tales of the half-breed had been told by even the oldest in Ethgan’tor. No matter how vile, no matter how cruel, he was a legend. His eyes glowed red, the only pinpoints of light that could be seen in the abyss. His hair was white and grizzled, skin a sickly gray. One couldn’t say that he was ugly. His face was still graceful, no matter how ancient and crazed it looked. But the eyes, blood-shot with whites a disgusting yellow. He wandered the entrance with barely an hour’s sleep per darkening, ready and willing to shed the blood of any who attempted escape. It was be an unheard of stroke of luck to find the exit, and even more so to escape. Impossible, incomprehensible, or at least covered up quite well.

Lil Vigaj, Lil Vigaj, many a song told of its woes. None exactly captured the starvation, the disease, the filth. Sentient beings were reduced to eating rats, tasting the fresh blood on lips that had once enjoyed fine delicacies. Horrors untold were committed without a second thought. Was this the stuff of Myth?