Stone Walls, Iron Doors, part one

Caracas fell when the guard shoved him over the edge. It was a good distance down, a fall to break bones; no doubt most prisoners made the descent with the help of a ladder, or at least a rope. These guards were looking to punish him well beyond the sentence he'd been given, and no wonder. He'd broken three of them, and they wanted to see him broken in turn. 

But the floor, when he landed, was stone; and stone would never harm him. His feet touched it and he rolled to the side, fetched up gently against the wall, and lay there. The chamber around him was shaped roughly like a vase, wider here at the bottom but narrowing as it curved up to the hole he'd been cast in through.

Two of the guards laughed when he didn't move, and Caracas marked their voices, matching them in his mind with their scents, the feel of their steps on the stone of the courtyard, the warmth of their bodies and minds. Down here in the dark, they couldn't see that he was looking back at them. After a minute or so, they swung the heavy iron gate shut over the entrance and slid the lock into place. 

When they finally moved away, Caracas considered his new environment. The walls were smooth, offering no grips for climbing, the entrance too high up for an ordinary man to reach. A shapechanger might manage it, but iron was widely known to imprison all manner of supernatural beings: beasts and spirits and sorcerers alike. 

So this is the Archon's justice. The judge, mistaking Caracas' reticent curiosity for weakness or at least humility, had declared himself merciful in sentencing the ignorant foreigner to be forgotten for a year and a day for his assault upon the guards, conveniently ignoring the fact that Caracas had been defending himself from them and not the other way around. It had been smoothly managed, too: Caracas had spoken his initial defense to the court, and then the guards had spun their story of his attack on them, and after that everyone had spoken of it as if he had attacked the guards.

After that he had held his tongue. There was little point in arguing with it, and even less in pointing out that he'd acted to prevent a rape and had had no idea that the perpetrators were members of the guard. More importantly, he didn't want to draw the attention of his cousin Jakar in his own demesne; he wasn't prepared to take on the gods. 

So: a year and a day in this oubliette, which was one of several along this side of the courtyard: close enough to daily life to hear it, but still easy to ignore even if he begged or screamed, and fully exposed if he somehow tried to escape through the grate. A land of laws, a domain of justice and mercy, would see him regularly fed and watered, even as it forgot him. Jakar's Imperium? He'd give it a week or so, just to see.

Caracas settled back comfortably against the stone.