"Walls can hold the body, but never the spark that waits beneath the ash."
In the dark, hope is a story someone else once told.
The cell had no windows. Only stone, and silence thick enough to drown in. A thin seam of light slipped through the door, but it offered no comfort—only proof they waited on the other side.
I learned to count time by the drip of water somewhere beyond the wall, a rhythm both merciless and steady. Hunger gnawed, but the silence was worse. Silence pressed on me, shaping itself into a second skin. It wasn't just that I could not speak. It was that I dared not to.
The Warden had made sure of that.
When the footsteps came, the stone seemed to hold its breath with me. The scrape of boots against rock always struck harder than any blow. I curled into myself, wishing to be smaller, invisible. But I never was.
The lock clanked open, and shadow filled the doorway before the man himself appeared. His presence entered first—heavy, suffocating—as if the air itself bent to him.
I still felt the echo of his grip from years ago, the night I was torn from my home. They had stormed in like a nightmare made flesh. My mother's scream still lived in me. The sack yanked over my head, the cart's wheels shrieking against stone, the guard's hand squeezing my ribs until I thought they'd break. Am I going to have issues with you, little bitch? he'd roared into my face. I had shaken my head so hard it blurred my vision. No sound had come. Only silence.
That silence had never left.
Now, the Warden's scarred eye gleamed in the torchlight as he studied me. His smile curved wide when my tears began to sting. "Still mute," he muttered, almost to himself. As though silence were defiance. As though brokenness were a choice.
I wanted to scream at him, to claw words from my throat. But nothing came. Only the remembered heat of fire. Only my heart hammering against its cage.
The Warden left at last. The lock slid home again, sharp and final.
Alone, I pressed my forehead to the wall. The stone was cold, grounding, a reminder I was still here. Still breathing.
The silence crept back in, thick as smoke.
And yet—buried somewhere beneath it—there was something else. A pulse. A whisper I couldn't quite name, faint and fragile as the memory of a voice I once knew.
I closed my eyes and let it flicker inside me: the smallest ember of warmth in a world of stone.
Not hope—not yet.
But something that might, one day, become it.