Date Unknown: Prison Journal of Luciana Henriette

• Posted by Piper Jo November 9, 2011 - 669 views

  I’ve lost track of time.  There’s no window in this cell, so the only way I had to track days was by meal times, but now I can’t remember how many there have been.

  I can’t sleep.  I lie awake in the dark thinking about my crimes. Wouldn’t my jailers love to hear that? But I don’t mean the crime I was arrested for.  That was a setup, and that’s another thing that keeps me awake.  No, I mean the crimes of pride and stupidity.  I wanted so badly to be seen as adult, a leader of an important organization, and I couldn’t see anything beyond that. So I led my family and friends into danger.  I sent my best friend out against a trained assassin.  What kind of a friend would do that?

  They won’t tell me what happened to anyone else. Durz and Da’ and Nils and Swims were all arrested at the same time I was.  They separated us and I’ve heard nothing about them since.  I don’t know whether my Ma was captured.  Or Farys, or Astrid or M’Dar, or… What’s awful is that just about everyone I ever knew was out searching that day.  Any of them could be rotting in prison right now, or already dead. I pray to Nocturnal that my Ma got away.

  Then I realize it doesn’t stop just with the people I know.  I activated that damn amulet—the one Durz said was meant to ‘swallow the world’.  It blew hell out of the farmhouse, and I felt like this great horde of awful beasts was shoving past me, like I had opened an Oblivion gate or something.  And it was written in my letters, like maybe I was destined to screw everything up!  So now, while I sit here in the dark and they won’t tell me what’s happening outside, maybe the world is ending.

  And then I get to thinking about that Argonian assassin, and I get so mad that I thrash on my cot and pound my fists against the walls and the floor.  That murdering dung heap presided at my trial!  GAAAAHHH!  I shouted out in the courtroom that the judge was an imposter from the Dark Brotherhood, and the entire room burst out laughing.  They had to gag me to shut me up.

  But then, sitting here in the dark, I wonder. Could it be we were wrong all along? Where did we get the idea they were Dark Brotherhood? Think! Oh yeah, it was Dalos’ idea, an eleven-year-old boy, and it just sort of took root and spread from there.  Could it be that the dark-cloak-guys were actually Imperial agents the entire time? Or here’s an idea that’s even scarier: maybe the Argonian really is Dark Brotherhood and an Imperial magistrate at the same time. Maybe the Brotherhood secretly controls the Empire.  I could believe it.

  Eventually—don’t know when—they’re going to come get me, put me in shackles, march me out to a gallows, and put my head in a noose, or on a chopping block, or they’ll stand me against a wall, or… there are so many choices.  Is there an afterlife?  I hope not.  I never want to feel or think or want anything ever again.

  This is all wrong.  If I think like that, I’m dead before they even come to get me.  I have to do something.  I should set my mind to a puzzle.  I’ll check every corner, crack and seam in this cell for a secret door, or a tunnel, or a spell scratched out by some escaped prisoner.  Maybe I can make myself believe I can fix these things.  At the very least, my mind will be occupied.