A Pallet, A Bucket, A Claim

"It's when everything else finally goes quiet that the things you've been running from catch up. Darkness doesn't need to chase you—it just waits until you stop moving."

The stairs seemed to go on forever.

Down and down, each flight taking us deeper into the earth. The air changed as we descended—cooler first, then cold, then something beyond cold. A dampness that seeped through my clothing and settled into my bones. The smell changed too. The mineral scent I'd noticed in the upper levels grew stronger, mixing with something else. Something organic. The smell of things growing in darkness, of water seeping through stone, of air that hadn't moved in a very long time.

The light faded as we went.

The blazing patterns of the upper floors gave way to simpler threads running along the walls. Then the threads grew sparse, scattered, leaving stretches of shadow between them. Then even those disappeared, and the only illumination came from the soft glow of the guards' clothing—those luminescent threads woven into their uniforms, pulsing gently with each step they took.

The vial pulsed against my chest. Warm. Steady. A small sun in the gathering dark.

Light in darkness, I thought. Hold onto that.

I lost count of the flights. Lost track of the turns and corridors and the endless succession of stone walls. The world narrowed to the grip of the hands carrying me, the ache in my bound arms, the rhythm of footsteps echoing off surfaces I could barely see.

How deep does this place go? I wondered. How far beneath the mountain are we now?

I tried to imagine it—tried to picture a cross-section of the earth above us, the layers of rock and cavern and city pressing down with all their weight. Hundreds of metres, maybe. More. The pressure of it should have been crushing, should have squeezed the air from my lungs and the thoughts from my head. But the air kept coming. The thoughts kept trickling through. And the stairs kept descending.

A door appeared ahead.

Heavy. Made from something darker than the surrounding stone—wood, maybe, though it was hard to tell in the dim light. Ancient-looking, its surface scarred and pitted, bound with bands of metal that had gone green with age. The guards carrying me stopped before it, and one of them produced something from a pouch at his belt.

A key. Or something like a key—I couldn't see it clearly, just caught a glimpse of something that caught the faint light and held it for a moment before being inserted into the lock. The mechanism clicked. The door swung open on hinges that groaned like something in pain.

Beyond it was darkness.

Not the soft darkness of the upper levels, punctuated by threads and channels of living light. This was something thicker. Something that seemed to have weight and substance, that pressed against my eyes like a hand over my face. The glow from the guards' clothing reached perhaps a metre into the space beyond before being swallowed completely.

My chest tightened. My breath came faster.

A dungeon, I thought. An actual dungeon. Deep beneath everything, where—

I cut the thought off. Couldn't afford to finish it. Couldn't afford to think about what happened to people in places like this.

The vial pulsed against my skin. Warm. Alive.

You have light. You have light of your own.

The guards carried me through the doorway.

The corridor beyond was narrow—so narrow that the guards had to turn sideways to fit through, my body scraping against the walls as they manoeuvred. The ceiling was low, close enough that I could have touched it if my arms had been free. And the walls... the walls were different here. Rougher. Unfinished. I could see the marks of tools in the stone—gouges and scratches where picks or chisels had carved this passage from solid rock. No decoration. No murals. No symbols. Just stone and darkness and the sound of breathing.

Something caught my eye overhead.

Patches of something on the ceiling, scattered like irregular stars. Faint. Greenish. Glowing with a light so dim I almost missed it.

Moss. Some kind of luminescent moss, clinging to the rock, surviving in conditions that should have made survival impossible.

Even down here, I thought. Even in this. Life finds a way.

The observation felt important. A small thing to hold onto. If moss could grow in this darkness, if something could survive in the depths of the earth with nothing but stone and silence and the occasional drip of water...

The corridor branched.

We turned left. Then right. Then left again, or maybe right—I was losing track already, the sameness of the walls and the darkness making every turn feel identical to the last. Each passage looked like the one before. Rough walls. Low ceiling. Patches of moss that provided just enough light to see the next few metres. Without the guards, I would have been hopelessly lost within minutes.

We passed doors set into the walls.

Heavy wooden things, bound with metal, each one identical to the last. Some were marked with symbols—scratched into the wood or painted in something that had faded to near-invisibility. Others were blank. Anonymous. Giving no indication of what lay behind them.

I tried to count them. Lost track after twelve. Tried to note distinctive features—a door with a deeper gouge in its surface, another with metal bindings that had rusted to a darker colour. But the details blurred together. My mind couldn't hold them.

How many cells? I wondered. How many people down here?

Sounds drifted through the stone. Faint. Muffled. A cough from somewhere to the left. Something that might have been weeping, quickly stifled. The scrape of movement behind a door we passed—footsteps, or something dragging across stone.

Not alone, I thought. There are others down here. Other prisoners.

The knowledge was cold comfort. Knowing that other people suffered in this place didn't make my own suffering any lighter. If anything, it made it worse. A reminder that I was just one more body in a system that had processed countless bodies before me. One more problem to be filed away and forgotten.

The guards stopped before one of the unmarked doors.

A key was produced. The lock clicked—a heavy, final sound that echoed off the stone walls and came back distorted, multiplied, like the cell itself was laughing at me. The door swung open on hinges that screamed with rust and age.

The cell beyond was small.

Perhaps three metres by three metres. Maybe less—it was hard to tell in the dimness. The walls were the same rough stone as the corridor, showing the same tool marks, the same sense of having been carved from solid rock by human hands. A single channel of light ran around the room at about chest height—those luminescent creatures, I assumed, the ones Sylvie had called Les Lumineux, contained in some kind of groove cut into the stone. The light they provided was barely enough to see by. Enough to make out shapes. Not enough to read by, or to examine details, or to do anything except exist in a permanent twilight.

A pallet lay against one wall—a thin mattress stuffed with something that crackled when the guards dropped me onto it. Straw, maybe. Or dried leaves. Or something else entirely, something that grew down here in the dark. A bucket sat in the corner. Its purpose was obvious. Its smell was already present, faint but unmistakable, a ghost of all the people who had used it before me.

That was it.

That was the sum total of my new home.

The guards deposited me on the pallet without ceremony. My bound arms screamed as my weight pressed them into the thin mattress—a fresh spike of pain on top of all the other pain, so intense that spots danced at the edges of my vision.

One of the guards produced a knife.

The blade caught the faint light as it moved toward me. Short. Curved. Sharp enough that I could see the edge even in the dimness.

This is it, I thought. The realisation was distant, detached, like it was happening to someone else. They're going to kill me here. Leave my body in this cell. No one will ever know what happened to Joel Gibbons.

But the knife moved to my wrists.

The cord parted with a sound like a sigh.

And then the guards were retreating. Backing out of the cell. Pulling the door closed behind them. The hinges screamed again—that same rusted shriek—and then the lock clicked, and then...

Silence.

I was alone.

For a long time, I didn't move.

I lay there on the pallet, staring at the ceiling I could barely see, listening to the silence that pressed against my ears like cotton wool. My arms lay at my sides—free, finally free, after hours of being bound—but I couldn't feel them properly. Just a tingling. A prickling. A sensation like static on a television screen, spreading from my shoulders to my fingertips.

Then the blood started flowing back.

The pain came in waves.

First a burning, like I'd plunged my arms into hot water. Then a prickling, like a thousand tiny needles being driven into my skin. Then something deeper—an ache that seemed to come from inside the bones themselves, a wrongness that made me want to scream.

I didn't scream. Bit down on my lip instead. Tasted blood—copper and salt, the most real thing I'd felt in hours. Focused on that taste, that small sharp pain, using it to anchor myself as the larger pain crested and broke and slowly, slowly began to recede.

The vial pulsed against my chest.

I'd almost forgotten it was there. But now, in the silence, I could feel it. That small warmth against my skin. That gentle rhythm, like a heartbeat that wasn't my own.

Light in darkness, I thought. The light you carry matters more than the light around you.

I fumbled for the vial with fingers that felt thick and clumsy, that didn't quite obey my commands. Found the cord around my neck. Pulled it out from beneath my shirt. Held it up in front of my face.

The glow was faint—fainter than I remembered from the terrace, when Sylvie had slipped it over my head. But it was there. A soft blue-green luminescence, pulsing gently, illuminating my fingers where they gripped the glass.

Les Lumineux, I thought. The tiny creatures. They're still alive. Still glowing.

I watched the light pulse for a long moment. In. Out. In. Out. Like breathing. Like a heartbeat. Like something that was alive and wanted to stay that way.

That makes two of us.

I let the vial fall back against my chest. Let my hand drop to my side. Let my eyes close against the darkness that surrounded me.

I should try to sit up. Should examine the cell properly, look for weaknesses, start planning... something. Anything. But my body wouldn't cooperate. Every muscle felt like it had been filled with sand. Every thought scattered before I could grasp it.

Rest, some part of me whispered. Just for a moment. Just close your eyes and rest.

It felt like surrender. Like giving up. But what choice did I have? My body was shutting down whether I wanted it to or not. I could fight it—could force myself to stay awake through sheer stubborn will—but what would that accomplish? I'd still be trapped. Still be broken. Still be unable to do anything except lie here and wait.

Sleep, the voice said again. Whatever comes next, you'll face it better if you've rested.

I let myself drift.

The darkness behind my eyelids was different from the darkness of the cell. Softer, somehow. More familiar. The darkness of every night I'd ever known, of closing my eyes in my bedroom in Glenorchy, of Mum's voice telling me to sleep well, to dream good dreams, to wake up ready for whatever tomorrow brought.

Mum.

The thought rose unbidden, bringing with it a wave of something I didn't have the energy to suppress. She'd be worried by now. Would have called my phone a hundred times, left messages that would never be heard, contacted the police, filed reports, done all the things a mother does when her son disappears. She'd be sitting in that chair by the window—the one with the worn armrest, the one where she always sat when she was anxious—staring out at the street and willing me to appear.

Unless she wasn’t. Unless she wan’t searching for me. Wasn’t doing any of those things a worried mother would do when their child didn’t come home. What if she simply thinks I need time? Or I’ve gone searching for my father and will surface when I am ready to talk? What if she doesn’t know that I am actually missing at all?

I'm sorry, I thought. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean for any of this to happen.

But I had no way to tell her that. No way to let her know I was alive—if this counted as alive. No way to do anything except lie here in the dark and hope that somehow, someday, I'd find my way back to her.

The thought dissolved. I couldn't hold onto it. Couldn't hold onto anything except the warmth of the vial against my chest and the slow rhythm of my own breathing.

You are mine, Joel Gibbons.

The voice came from nowhere and everywhere. From the darkness behind my eyes and the silence pressing against my ears. From the lagoon where I'd died and been reborn, where something vast and patient had reached into me and made its claim.

I'd pushed the memory aside. Had filed it away with all the other things I couldn't afford to think about—the resurrection, the impossibility of still being alive, the wrongness that had settled into my bones ever since I'd crawled out of that water. But here, in the dark, in the silence, it came flooding back.

What did you do to me? I asked the memory. What did you make me?

No answer came. Just the echo of that voice, patient and ancient and utterly certain.

You are mine.

I fell asleep with those words still ringing in my ears.