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Tilin usually awoke to sunshine in the morning.
There was always sun coming from somewhere, usually the windows or the door if his papa had already left. It was what woke him up most days, and what put him to bed, along with some terribly told stories that Tilin couldn’t help but smile at despite everything.
But today, there was no sunshine.
Today, there was only darkness.
That was ok. Tilin knew darkness. There had been darkness when she’d first been born and there was darkness when the sun went down. Darkness was scary but it wasn’t the end of the world. It was just darkness.
They blinked once; twice. Then let their eyes close again. They weren’t particularly tired, but nighttime meant bedtime, or at least that’s what Tia Jaiden always said. Besides, if they got up too early they’d be too tired to see Flippa later in the day. Yes, it was better to go back to sleep. Sunlight would come soon.
So long as they went to bed.
So long as they slept the night away.
Right?
The weird thing was there was no sound. Well… not really. They could hear themselves breathing but there were no footsteps from the wandering wildlife outside; no groans or growls from patrolling monsters on the lookout for holes in their defences. And wasn’t Papa sleeping too? He snored a little. Where were the snores? And the wind, the wind usually whistled around the house. Why wasn’t there any wind?
Tilin’s eyes opened again. Maybe it was ok to get up and move about for just a bit before going back to bed. Just to investigate a little. Yeah, papa wouldn’t get mad so long as he stayed in the house.
Shifting up onto their elbows, Tilin began pushing themselves up into a sitting position, but before they were even at a forty-five-degree angle their head made painful contact with something hard and unwieldy.
They fell back down onto the soft cushioning beneath them with a whine. One hand instinctively moved to press against their poor injured head but, again, they’d barely moved before their elbow hit the side of something solid, eliciting another sharp hiss of pain. A few moments passed before the aching sensation faded enough for them to understand what had happened. They’d hit something. But what? There was nothing above their bed. Papi made sure of that.
Slowly, Tilin raised a hand and pressed it against the thing above them. It felt polished and hard enough to make her wrist ache with the effort of trying to push it upwards. Whatever it was, it was locked there.
Tilin took a deep breath. It was ok, maybe she’d been moved to a bunk bed in her sleep and didn’t know it. She was babysat a lot, that was nothing out of the ordinary. Still, her hands were shaking when she pressed them against the sides, searching for some opening somewhere. Polished wood slid over her fingers, smooth and endless and unbreaking. Her feet – bare and getting colder by the second – flexed to brush the end of her confines to find more polished wood erected in a square shape at her rear. A quick spread of her little legs revealed something similar, and above her…
Thud
More wood.
Oh.
So maybe…
Maybe this wasn’t ok.
Tilin had his hands held up over his head, as far from his ears as he could get them, which wasn’t really very far. Slightly achy fingers curled up against the end of his confinements and knuckles brushed the top of his scalp, bringing his attention to something else horrible. His bow; his bow was gone.
Suddenly breathing was an impossibility. All air was trapped in Tilin’s throat and refusing to come out. His heart was pounding so ferociously he could feel it in all his extremities; his feet were tingling; a snake had made its nauseous home in his stomach.
It was very dark, and very, very quiet. Tilin’s hands were dead in their confined upward curve; frozen as if threatened by some unseen animal. It seemed as if the eternal, enclosed darkness was watching them with invisible eyes, like a demon hovering above them, trapping them within the polished wood. A harsh rush of breath broke out of Tilin’s mouth and they felt it immediately rush back to their lips like a ghostly kiss. Was the darkness getting closer?
“Papa?”
The word echoed; a thousand tiny calls for help. They seem to go on for longer than they should have, mocking Tilin in increasingly higher-pitched, taunting tones.
Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Papa? Pa-
They cut off with a choking noise; a broken gurgle that scraped Tilin’s ears from the inside. There was a scream and a series of harsh, sobs that sounded disturbingly like a set of long nails was being dragged down someone’s throat. The wailing grew louder and more hellishly agonising, echoing around Tilin’s box of darkness like a bell that wouldn’t stop ringing and then-
Silence.
Tilin’s heart in his ears, a broken, arrhythmic melody like it was taking the poor thing a few tries to restart itself. The chilliness of the box had dug its way under Tilin’s skin and laid down over his bones like a stubborn blanket. There was a near-constant shiver under his skin that refused to be released. It was as if his body had temporarily forgotten how to function.
A clingy, gnawing something began to eat at the inside of Tilin’s stomach and suddenly she was aware of just how hungry she was. It was as if she hadn’t eaten in months. And her throat, oh her throat . There had to be parasites inside eating away at the flesh, draining blood and water from the inside, turning it into a lump of dried nothing.
Tilin took another deep breath, only to find that whatever oxygen had occupied the dark had begun to decay, piercing their lungs with the sting of suffocation. A sharp shot of panic tore through Tilin’s chest and stuck there like shrapnel. They were going to die; they were going to die trapped in this tiny box with nothing but the glaring darkness and the endless thumping of their heart to keep them company.
Little hands pounded frantically against the roof of polished wood. Thumping noises filled the room to the rhythm of Tilin’s heart as he began to scream and sob against the enclosing pool of pitch that was the air around him. Bruises formed and skin split as they bashed their fists again and again against the unforgiving solidity of their confinement. The wood shook, but it never gave. Never.
Tilin’s screams grew in intensity. They couldn’t breathe at all anymore, too asphyxiated by either the sobbing of the quickly draining oxygen. The only thing powering their cries was the searing pain growing in their chest and the desperate, heart-stabbing need to get out .
Tilin’s fists hit harder than ever before and suddenly the wood gave, swinging open like a lid. Tilin’s sobs stuttered and quieted in shock as the darkness became the muted lights of a marbled room with red ribbons strung all along the walls. They lowered their aching fists to the layer of red cushions underneath their trembling body, and, sitting up on their elbows, stared up around the sight. Where were they?
Suddenly a face appeared in Tilin’s field of view and a wide, relieved smile spread across his face.
“Papa!” He cried with as much breath as he could manage. A hand landed on his shoulder and shoved him back down. An annoyed frown creased the familiar face.
“Quiet,” it ordered.
And the box closed again with a click.