FFM 2023 10: The Road to Freedom – Take I

No prompts used. This is a continuation to FFM 2023 9: Imprisonment – Take V.

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It was dark when Bereth awoke. It was easier on his eyes, but it was also far harder to make out his surroundings. His body was still full of pain and aches and the air was chilly like deserts at night tended to be, but in most areas, his bare skin was in contact with something warm — it felt like someone else’s skin. A hand was caressing his hair and… Bereth was fairly sure that his head was on someone’s lap. No, it felt like he in his entirety was being held on multiple laps. Almost like people were huddling around him…

…Honestly, that would make sense, considering the coldness and the fact that he was at least mostly — if not completely, Bereth was not sure about that yet — naked.

“Safe,” the hoarse voice that had lulled Bereth to sleep whispered with a heavy accent. “No move. You hurt.”

Bereth hummed to show that he had heard and understood, relaxing and letting the hand keep trailing his hair.

As he waited for the sun to rise — or someone who spoke the his language more fluently to wake up — the weight of everything that had happened in the past weeks — months? — settled in for real. Bereth had not allowed himself to fully stop ever since the moment he had heard the news of his mentor’s death, constantly on the move both to keep the ring safe and to run away from the pain he had thought he had left at his former home. Now that he had nothing to do but wait and listen to the sounds of his living fellows, everything caught up to him. As he lay still, injured and held by naked strangers who were most likely also injured, his mentor’s ended existence — the loss of his only (seemingly) permanently standing support network — realized itself properly. He had always given everything to his mentor in exchange for taking an orphan like him in and now…

…now, he had nothing but a dangerous, powerful ring on his finger. The woman who had taught him everything he knew and given him strength when he had been weak had been reduced to ashes and scattered to the winds.

He was all alone again.

When others woke up to his sobs and soothed him, Bereth claimed his physical pains to be the cause of his tears. The pile of people, all of them battered and naked like him, wrapping themselves around him was comforting in a way nothing had been ever since he had lost the greatest parent figure he had ever had.