Unwanted Solitude (Lowest Point)

Dora watched from the rafters of the Bee’s Knees as Lavender was fit into a tight jacket, her arms wrapped around her body with her hands shackled inside a pair of heavy metal balls attached to each other.

The music Enfield played forced Lavender to jerkily walk out of the tavern with the rest of her party shuffling after her, the group moving towards a building in the distance that Dora had been to a few times. It was a makeshift jail that Guild members stashed away their bounty targets and malcontents.

She hopped down from the rafters and went outside once most of the excitement had cleared out. The Guild would be back in a few minutes to continue celebrating, only now because they were about to get paid and then some.

As for her… well, she was at a crossroad. Lavender had released Dora from her obligations. Her parents would surely understand the engagement being terminated under the circumstances. The Black Rose was well and truly free now.

Her eyes lingered on the horses in the fenced-off pasture. For the first time in years, Dira was free of any oath to her parents or to any prospective courtship. She could take a horse and ride away from this place.

All it would take was letting her former fiancé take a short walk off the gallows.

----

Designing a jail cell in a world of magic was a small cottage industry. And often members of the Adventurers’ Guild were brought in to field test their work.

It stood to reason then, that the Adventurers’ Guild had some of the most secure cells in all the realm. After all, Guild members had likely broken out of their fair share of prisons. They knew what they’d try. And as Lavender had been finding out over the past hour, what they’d come up with was diabolical.

Of course they’d use magic to inhibit certain things. But it was the spell they’d chosen that was giving her a literal headache. Every time she ran afoul of their ‘rules’, Lavender found herself getting punched in the face. There was no one else in the room with her nor anything visible to dodge.

The metal spheres, the jacket, the way it constrained her arms, all of it made casting magic with her hands impractical. But the second she started casting a spell with her feet? Punch to the face.

No windows. But if her feet left the ground? Punch to the face. Repeatedly. Until her feet touched the floor.

Try to barge down the cell door with her shoulder? Two punches to the face, one for trying to use magic to get some extra oomph and another for trying at all.

Now Lavender had a black eye and a busted lip. As much as she’d taken a beating, it was not for nothing. She had a better understanding of how things worked in here. It seemed that any time she was going to cast a spell, the magic enchanting the spell cast a spell to punch her. It seemed timed to hit her while she was casting, preventing the spell from going off. The cell also appeared to expect a certain amount of weight at any given time.

The cell’s magical defenses were designed to counter any attempt to smuggle a focus inside. In a pinch, Lavender would have asked Balerifon to turn into a dragon to destroy the building itself. But if the magic would keep punching her until the rules were in compliance… Lavender questioned if her or Robert or Hazel would survive the process.

This many magical defenses would require some dedicated object to sustain. But unlike the last time she’d been thrown into a jail cell, her captors didn’t bother to position it just out of reach. No illusion of hope, only the cold knowledge that there was no escape.

Lavender felt her back go against a cell wall. She started to slide down to her knees with a heaving sigh. The bitterness of the Guild’s betrayal was still working its way through her mind. But the longer she sat there in her cell, the more a darker thought intruded.

She was back in the dragon’s keep again. Her heart began racing in a panic.

-----

Ten years. Ten years of waiting in her room, waiting for her true love to come.

Lavender convinced herself at first that it would happen. These things took time. Especially when there was a big scary dragon between them and you. Just wait, one day her knight in shining armor was going to come walking into the mountain, climb the steps of the dragon’s keep, take her into his arms, and tell her that he’s here to rescue her.

She could only go so many years imagining that scenario. Growing up year by year, spending every birthday night in the same bed staring at the same ceiling thinking that this year was going to be different. And then she woke up the next morning and had to speak to the same dragon and start training again.

The revolution against her father shouldn’t have mattered. Not if true love was real.

Lavender wasn’t sure when she realized no one was ever coming to save her. But that was when she threw herself into Balerifon’s training all the more.

If she couldn’t count on anyone to rescue her, then she had to count on herself. And if that failed….

----

Lavender broke into tears. She failed.

She was going to be in a cell like this for however brief her time was in this life. They’d hand her over to Vallois and that would be it. Ten generations of the House of Wea’Vor, the last gasps of the Dezerin Empire. And she’d never even know why.

In the end, she still wasn’t enough. Not skilled enough to rescue herself. Not enough for anyone else to try.

Over her sobs, Lavender could hear something else. Something scraping against the metal of her cell door.

There were a set of claws running along the bars of the door and a cat woman with black ears staring at her from the other side.

Lavender was too numb to flinch at Dora’s sudden arrival.