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4
All knowledge of measuring time had escaped Grignr. When a
person is deprived of the sun, moon, and stars, he looses all
conception of time as he had previously understood it. It seemed
as if years had passed if time were being measured by terms of
misery and mental anguish, yet he estimated that his stay had
only been a few days in length. He has slept three times and had
been fed five times since his awakening in the crypt. However,
when the actions of the body are restricted its needs are also
affected. The need for nourishmnet and slumber are directly
proportional to the functions the body has performed, meaning
that when free and active Grignr may become hungry every six
hours and witness the desire for sleep every fifteen hours,
whereas in his present condition he may encounter the need for
food every ten hours, and the want for rest every twenty hours.
All methods he had before depended upon were extinct in the
dismal pit. Hence, he may have been imprisoned for ten minutes
or ten years, he did not know, resulting in a disheartened
emotion deep within his being.
The food, if you can honor the moldering lumps of fetid mush
to that extent, was born to him by two guards who opened a portal
at the top of his enclosure and shoved it to him in wooden bowls,
retrieving the food and water bowels from his previous meal at
the same time, after which they threw back the bolts on the iron
latch and returned to their other duties. Since deprived of all
other means of nourishment, Grignr was impelled to eat the
tainted slop in order to ward off the paings of starvation,
though as he stuffed it into his mouth with his filthy fingers
and struggled to force it down his throat, he imagined it was
that which had been spurned by the hounds stationed at various
segments of the palace.
There was little in the baren vault that could occupy his
body or mind. He had paced out the length and width of the
enclosure time and time again and tested every granite slab which
consisted the walls of the prison in hopes of finding a hidden
passage to freedom, all of which was to no avail other than to
keep him busy and distract his mind from wandering to thoughts of
what he believed was his future. He had memorized the number of
strides from one end to the other of the cell, and knew the exact
number of slabs which made up the bleak dungeon. Numorous
schemes were introduced and alternately discarded in turn as they
succored to unravel to him no means of escape which stood the
slightest chance of sucess.
Anguish continued to mount as his means of occupation were
rapidly exhausted. Suddenly without no tive, he wasrouted from
his contemplations as he detected a faint scratching sound at the
end of the crypt opposite him. The sound seemed to be caused by
something trying to scrape away at the grantite blocks the floor
of the enclosure consisted of, the sandy scratching of something
like an animal's claws.
Grignr gradually groped his way to the other end of the
vault carefully feeling his way along with his hands ahead of
him. When a few inches from the wall, a loud, penetrating
squeal, and the scampering of small padded feet reverberated from
the walls of the roughly hewn chamber.
Grignr threw his hands up to shield his face, and flung
himself backwards upon his buttocks. A fuzzy form bounded to his
hairy chest, burying its talons in his flesh while gnashing
toward his throat with its grinding white teeth;its sour, fetid
breath scortching the sqirming barbarians dilating nostrils.
Grignr grappled with the lashing flexor muscles of the repugnant
body of a garganuan brownhided rat, striving to hold its razor
teeth from his juicy jugular, as its beady grey organs of sight
glazed into the flaring emeralds of its prey.
Taking hold of the rodent around its lean, growling stomach
with both hands Grignr pried it from his crimson rent breast,
removing small patches of flayed flesh from his chest in the
motion between the squalid black claws of the starving beast.
Holding the rodent at arms length, he cupped his righthand over
its frothing face, contrcting his fingers into a vice-like fist
over the quivering head. Retaining his grips on the rat, grignr
flexed his outstretched arms while slowly twisting his right hand
clockwise and his left hand counter clockwise motion. The rodent
let out a tortured squall, drawing scarlet as it violently dug
its foam flecked fangs into the barbarians sweating palm, causing
his face to contort to an ugly grimace as he cursed beneath his
braeth.
With a loud crack the rodents head parted from its squirming
torso, sending out a sprinking shower of crimson gore, and
trailing a slimy string of disjointed vertebrae, snapped trachea,
esophagus, and jugular, disjointed hyoid bone, morose purpled
stretched hide, and blood seared muscles.
Flinging the broken body to the floor, Grignr shook his
blood streaked hands and wiped them against his thigh until dry,
then wiped the blood that had showered his face and from his
eyes. Again sitting himself upon the jagged floor, he prepared
to once more revamp his glum meditations. He told himself that
as long as he still breathed the gust of life through his lungs,
hope was not lost; he told himself this, but found it hard to
comprehend in his gloomy surroundings. Yet he was still alive,
his bulging sinews at their peak of marvel, his struggling mind
floating in a miral of impressed excellence of thought. Plot
after plot sifted through his mind in energetic contemplations.
Then it hit him. Minutes may have passed in silent thought
or days, he could not tell, but he stumbled at last upon a plan
that he considered as holding a slight margin of plausibility.
He might die in the attempt, but he knew he would not submit
without a final bloody struggle. It was not a foolproof plan,
yet it built up a store of renewed vortexed energy in his
overwroughtsoul, though he might perish in the execution of the
escape, he would still be escaping the life of infinite torture
in store forhim. Either way he would still cheat the gloating
prince of the succored revenge his sadistic mind craved so
dearly.
The guards would soon come to bear him off to the prince's
buried mines of dread, giving him the sought after opportunity to
execute his newly formulated plan. Groping his way along the
rough floor Grignr finally found his tool in a pool of congealed
gore; the carcass of the decapitated rodent; the tool that the
very filth he had been sentenced too, spawned. When the time
came for action he would have to be prepared, so he set himself
to rending the sticky hulk in grim silence, searching by the
touch of his fingertips for the lever to freedom.
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