5 Ash, 121
It was cool and dark, and that was alright. The cell Rivin had been placed in wasn’t bad by any means. The walls were undecorated stone, but they were dry. The floor also was stone, dry, and even appeared to have been cleaned recently. What time of day it was he could only guess at, he had slept and woken several times since he’d been escorted to his new home and as he had no way to tell how long he slept, it could now be any time of the day or night. It did not seem to grow perceptibly cooler or warmer as time passed, however, so he imagined he was underground.
He had been in many worse places. The food arrived regularly, he was watered and his waste was removed. All in all, this was as comfortable as he was likely to ask for under the circumstances.
The circumstances, he reminded himself, were complicated. It had been at least a day since he’d been placed there. The journey from the estate where he'd been raised to the city had not been awful either. He'd been placed in a carriage, and if the windows had been barred and the door's locked from the outside, well, he was a slave, what else was expected? It wasn't as if he'd never made efforts to cause trouble either. There had certainly been plenty of that in the years since his puberty had come upon him.
He had been bagged before they took him from the carriage into the new house, he was fairly sure it was a house, and a grand one, by the echos of the rooms he'd been taken through and the number of different servants he'd observed bringing him things or taking them away. They wore livery too, though not the same ones the from his master's servants in the Imperium. It stood to reason that they were being housed at an estate owned by someone else, or that in Zaichaer, his master's servants wore different.
Rivin knew they were in Zaichaer now. Had overheard the drivers speaking to one another as they crossed the bored, discussing whether they would be in trouble for transporting slaves into the State where slavery was, technically, illegal. The possibility of a major change coming to his life because of this had occurred to their passenger, but he looked on it with neither hope nor any other emotional particularly. If something changed, his demon would let him know.
Whenever he'd been moved he'd been kept in a secured area, a cell usually, for a time. It was most likely so his owner could adjust and become settled before any use of him was worth the time to get him. Even when he was not being moved was not at all unusual for him to be locked away for extended periods with no way to entertain himself, or even tell time. He had learned to deal with this shortly after he’d been removed from his mother. The solution was to go back to the beginning and run all the information through the part of his brain that was always able to find solutions for him. If he did it long enough, concentrated on it hard enough, it would always give him the answers he was looking for.
If he was let out before he had come to any useful conclusions, well, the act of searching had done its job in another way.
Wiggling a bit, getting his back in a position he knew he could maintain in comfort, he put both his arms behind his head and took himself back.
~~~~
The first thing he remembered was her. His mother. She had been slim but curved in a way he would grow to understand was attractive to men; hard and soft at the same time. Her voice, or maybe her hands, were the first thing he remembered. The warmth of her skin against his body seemed so huge in those first thoughts, as he’d sought nourishment and safety in the darkness.
Sound and feel were the first senses he learned to use, scent came soon after, but when everything smelled the same all the time it was difficult to recognize you were using the sense at all. His mother, the small room they were in, it all blended together.
Light had been painful, at first, for it had also been rare, and his eyesight had developed poorly. The doctors, or, more likely, the healers, had fixed that later, but in those first memories, the ones that included sight at all, everything had been a blur of searing discomfort.
She had sung to him, spoken to him, in a language he learned from her alone. His first had actually been two, though it took his mind time to realize this and separate them. Her tone changed when she spoke to those who brought what sustained her, and, as she weaned him away from her breast, him also. He was reluctant to begin eating that which did not come from her body, and she had been forced to be harsh with him when he would spit out the mush she fed him from her fingers and reach for her chest. It was the first time she was anything to him but gentle, and it awakened in his mind a new concept. Things Changed.
At that time she had also explained to him the need to learn to behave a certain way for their captors, for his survival. This knowledge came with other new concepts; they were not free, their lives could be decided by others, could be taken from them. To ensure his cooperation with the outsiders she explained that he could be taken from her at any time, and would need knowledge to find her again. For the first time terror had entered Rivin’s toddler heart, and he’d spent a whole cycle between meals clinging to her and weeping as though he were broken. When he finally stopped, when his heart had hardened from its perfect softness to something able to hold a shape, he reached for her offered lessons as his growing body soon learned to reach for the food passed to them through the door.
Once in a while the outsiders would come and beckon his mother out, leaving him in his tiny world alone. The first few times had been new terrors, with him screaming and weeping alternately, too young to know how to threaten, beg, or bargain. But she always came back, usually within the same meal cycle, so he had learned to remain calmer during these times of isolation as he grew older.
His understanding of time in that tiny place of mostly darkness was fluid, but he had been just starting to really walk on his own when they came to take him out for the first time. He could understand some of what was being said as the oddly pale, hairy beings had arrived and explained to his mother that Rivin had survived long enough to begin the testing.
She had seemed pleased, so, Rivin too had been; feeling in a very basic way as though he had done something good. For the first time, the door had swung wide and he hadn't been held back from it. Taking his first, unsteady steps into the wider world had led down hallways that terrified him utterly. They were huge, with ceilings that rose forever, light that came from everywhere. Doors opened here and there like scabs left uncovered. When the hallways ended they had entered a chamber, many times larger than the cell room he’d been thus far raised in, with large windows showing the open sky. He'd shrieked. Only once, clinging to his mother with each limb, eyes closed tight as his belly roiled, filled with perfect certainty that he would fall up and smash apart against the infinite blue above.
She had been comforting, in that moment, but had not coddled him, and he was used to her reassuring insistence, so, after he was sure his last meal would not come back up, he did his best to uncurl himself from around her and stand up.
When he'd opened his eyes, trying not to look at the gashes of bright that showed him an impossible world, he was able to look around the room. This was the first time he saw Doctor Ilex, the man who owned him. He had been older, at that time, than anyone else Rivin had ever seen. His wrinkled face was impassive at first, but when Rivin had looked up and met his eyes he had smiled. Not a coaxing thing, nor the smile he would learn adults usually gave to children. It touched his eyes, and held something in it more real than Rivin's young mind had words for, but there was a recognition of something. It passed between them as they both stood, looking without speaking for a long moment.
"He isn't afraid?" The Doctor had asked, not taking his eyes from Rivin, but directing the question to his mother.
"My son is not afraid. He was startled by the sky, only." She answered, no defiance in it only certainty. It was the first time Rivin had realized that her accent was distinctly different from that of the outsiders. He could understand her words, and the Doctor's words but they sounded different. The Doctor nodded, making a little 'ahh' sound as he recalled that Rivin had never been outside of his cell before that day. Still not looking away from the boy he asked,
"What do you call him?"
"I call him Rivin." His mother's voice was so calm, so relaxed, there could be nothing to fear. So, when the Doctor held out his hand and addressed him for the first time,
"Come here, Rivin." The toddler had let go of his mother's hand and walked on tiny bare feet, as steadily as he could, over to the man who would come to offer him more knowledge, help, and pain than his mind on that day could possibly have imagined.
It was cool and dark, and that was alright. The cell Rivin had been placed in wasn’t bad by any means. The walls were undecorated stone, but they were dry. The floor also was stone, dry, and even appeared to have been cleaned recently. What time of day it was he could only guess at, he had slept and woken several times since he’d been escorted to his new home and as he had no way to tell how long he slept, it could now be any time of the day or night. It did not seem to grow perceptibly cooler or warmer as time passed, however, so he imagined he was underground.
He had been in many worse places. The food arrived regularly, he was watered and his waste was removed. All in all, this was as comfortable as he was likely to ask for under the circumstances.
The circumstances, he reminded himself, were complicated. It had been at least a day since he’d been placed there. The journey from the estate where he'd been raised to the city had not been awful either. He'd been placed in a carriage, and if the windows had been barred and the door's locked from the outside, well, he was a slave, what else was expected? It wasn't as if he'd never made efforts to cause trouble either. There had certainly been plenty of that in the years since his puberty had come upon him.
He had been bagged before they took him from the carriage into the new house, he was fairly sure it was a house, and a grand one, by the echos of the rooms he'd been taken through and the number of different servants he'd observed bringing him things or taking them away. They wore livery too, though not the same ones the from his master's servants in the Imperium. It stood to reason that they were being housed at an estate owned by someone else, or that in Zaichaer, his master's servants wore different.
Rivin knew they were in Zaichaer now. Had overheard the drivers speaking to one another as they crossed the bored, discussing whether they would be in trouble for transporting slaves into the State where slavery was, technically, illegal. The possibility of a major change coming to his life because of this had occurred to their passenger, but he looked on it with neither hope nor any other emotional particularly. If something changed, his demon would let him know.
Whenever he'd been moved he'd been kept in a secured area, a cell usually, for a time. It was most likely so his owner could adjust and become settled before any use of him was worth the time to get him. Even when he was not being moved was not at all unusual for him to be locked away for extended periods with no way to entertain himself, or even tell time. He had learned to deal with this shortly after he’d been removed from his mother. The solution was to go back to the beginning and run all the information through the part of his brain that was always able to find solutions for him. If he did it long enough, concentrated on it hard enough, it would always give him the answers he was looking for.
If he was let out before he had come to any useful conclusions, well, the act of searching had done its job in another way.
Wiggling a bit, getting his back in a position he knew he could maintain in comfort, he put both his arms behind his head and took himself back.
~~~~
The first thing he remembered was her. His mother. She had been slim but curved in a way he would grow to understand was attractive to men; hard and soft at the same time. Her voice, or maybe her hands, were the first thing he remembered. The warmth of her skin against his body seemed so huge in those first thoughts, as he’d sought nourishment and safety in the darkness.
Sound and feel were the first senses he learned to use, scent came soon after, but when everything smelled the same all the time it was difficult to recognize you were using the sense at all. His mother, the small room they were in, it all blended together.
Light had been painful, at first, for it had also been rare, and his eyesight had developed poorly. The doctors, or, more likely, the healers, had fixed that later, but in those first memories, the ones that included sight at all, everything had been a blur of searing discomfort.
She had sung to him, spoken to him, in a language he learned from her alone. His first had actually been two, though it took his mind time to realize this and separate them. Her tone changed when she spoke to those who brought what sustained her, and, as she weaned him away from her breast, him also. He was reluctant to begin eating that which did not come from her body, and she had been forced to be harsh with him when he would spit out the mush she fed him from her fingers and reach for her chest. It was the first time she was anything to him but gentle, and it awakened in his mind a new concept. Things Changed.
At that time she had also explained to him the need to learn to behave a certain way for their captors, for his survival. This knowledge came with other new concepts; they were not free, their lives could be decided by others, could be taken from them. To ensure his cooperation with the outsiders she explained that he could be taken from her at any time, and would need knowledge to find her again. For the first time terror had entered Rivin’s toddler heart, and he’d spent a whole cycle between meals clinging to her and weeping as though he were broken. When he finally stopped, when his heart had hardened from its perfect softness to something able to hold a shape, he reached for her offered lessons as his growing body soon learned to reach for the food passed to them through the door.
Once in a while the outsiders would come and beckon his mother out, leaving him in his tiny world alone. The first few times had been new terrors, with him screaming and weeping alternately, too young to know how to threaten, beg, or bargain. But she always came back, usually within the same meal cycle, so he had learned to remain calmer during these times of isolation as he grew older.
His understanding of time in that tiny place of mostly darkness was fluid, but he had been just starting to really walk on his own when they came to take him out for the first time. He could understand some of what was being said as the oddly pale, hairy beings had arrived and explained to his mother that Rivin had survived long enough to begin the testing.
She had seemed pleased, so, Rivin too had been; feeling in a very basic way as though he had done something good. For the first time, the door had swung wide and he hadn't been held back from it. Taking his first, unsteady steps into the wider world had led down hallways that terrified him utterly. They were huge, with ceilings that rose forever, light that came from everywhere. Doors opened here and there like scabs left uncovered. When the hallways ended they had entered a chamber, many times larger than the cell room he’d been thus far raised in, with large windows showing the open sky. He'd shrieked. Only once, clinging to his mother with each limb, eyes closed tight as his belly roiled, filled with perfect certainty that he would fall up and smash apart against the infinite blue above.
She had been comforting, in that moment, but had not coddled him, and he was used to her reassuring insistence, so, after he was sure his last meal would not come back up, he did his best to uncurl himself from around her and stand up.
When he'd opened his eyes, trying not to look at the gashes of bright that showed him an impossible world, he was able to look around the room. This was the first time he saw Doctor Ilex, the man who owned him. He had been older, at that time, than anyone else Rivin had ever seen. His wrinkled face was impassive at first, but when Rivin had looked up and met his eyes he had smiled. Not a coaxing thing, nor the smile he would learn adults usually gave to children. It touched his eyes, and held something in it more real than Rivin's young mind had words for, but there was a recognition of something. It passed between them as they both stood, looking without speaking for a long moment.
"He isn't afraid?" The Doctor had asked, not taking his eyes from Rivin, but directing the question to his mother.
"My son is not afraid. He was startled by the sky, only." She answered, no defiance in it only certainty. It was the first time Rivin had realized that her accent was distinctly different from that of the outsiders. He could understand her words, and the Doctor's words but they sounded different. The Doctor nodded, making a little 'ahh' sound as he recalled that Rivin had never been outside of his cell before that day. Still not looking away from the boy he asked,
"What do you call him?"
"I call him Rivin." His mother's voice was so calm, so relaxed, there could be nothing to fear. So, when the Doctor held out his hand and addressed him for the first time,
"Come here, Rivin." The toddler had let go of his mother's hand and walked on tiny bare feet, as steadily as he could, over to the man who would come to offer him more knowledge, help, and pain than his mind on that day could possibly have imagined.
