lire's 40 to the 40s - masterlist

+1. i hear your name in every word i say

prisoner

There are no locks in this part of Hell. It’s one of the first things Edwin finds out about his new arrangement, when the demon Sa’al trades him to trades Edwin in turn to the Spider Doll. There’s nothing keeping him from escaping, and yet, there is no way out.

Edwin is a prisoner in Hell, and not even the experience he has acquired after twenty years down there has prepared him for the torture the spider puts him through.

At least he thinks it’s been twenty years—there is no difference between day and night in Hell, so Edwin cannot distinguish them at all. When he was with Sa’al—and with the second demon who never gave Edwin his name—Edwin had measured time with the intervals between one torture method or another.

With the spider, Edwin recounts the passing of time using his deaths. He’s already on his seventy-fifth death—which could mean that a year or a second have passed. He would never know, not until he’s out of this lockless cell.

Edwin tries escaping, so many times he loses count. It’s the only thing he can do in Hell, while he waits for the spider to dismember him in yet another colourful way. He counts—the number of times he’s gotten a wrong turn and ended up colliding against a Misery Wraith, the blood stains on the wall opposite to the shrine where the spider starts its torture, the tears that escape his eyes when he can’t stand the pain anymore.

The more Edwin screams while being killed, the happier the spider seems, its maniacal giggles instilling into Edwin’s mind. He resorts to not crying at all; not a sound escapes his mouth, much in the same way as he cannot escape Hell. The spider takes its sweet time torturing him, trying to elicit some reaction out of him, but Edwin remains stoic under the unbearable pain the spider puts him through, his mind wandering to the moment when he might be free of all this.

That hope fuels him, emboldening him to keep pushing his limits, to keep trying, until one day, when he begins running, nothing stops him until he stumbles into the same basement where his classmates had sacrificed him to Sa’al. And then Edwin finds out that there is another kind of torture, so different from the ones he’s endured in Hell, but just as painful.

He’s missed seven decades while being trapped in Hell. The world doesn’t make sense anymore—there are so many things that he doesn’t understand, and he has nobody to ask about them. So he chooses not to leave the school where he had been killed, becoming then a prisoner of his own fears.

Until one night, brandishing the lamp he found on his first day back to St. Hilarion, he meets a wonderful boy who chooses to stay with Edwin instead of moving forward, giving Edwin the best present he’s ever received.

A taste of freedom.