Flux

Chief had intentionally set up his son Camens to be caught in bed with that boy, angrier than when Miner had attacked the Chief with his sword.
    He lurched to his feet a bit unsteadily and, unmindful of his nudity, ran at the fence. He was slightly gratified when the guards instinctively scrambled away, expressions of shock on their faces. “You bastards !” Miner yelled. He grabbed the iron poles and shook them with all his might, but they didn’t budge. “He was trying to save you all! I’m not a thing—none of us are bloody things to be bought and sold and caged like animals. We’re human beings and Ennek loves me!”
    The guards must have tired quickly of his outburst because one of them approached the bars, yelled something incomprehensible at Miner, and jammed the butt end of a spear into Miner’s belly. Miner yelped and doubled over with pain. A few dribbles of bile spewed from the stomach he would have sworn was empty.
    As suddenly as it had arrived, the anger washed out of him, leaving nothing but bitter despair and a pit of whirling emptiness. Miner backed away and sank down to the ground again. He wrapped his arms around his knees and looked up at the sky, which was beginning to grow purple with nightfall. There were no hovering birds. He wondered how long it would be before Akilina grew impatient for their return. Perhaps Ennek was still alive somewhere and she would find him and rescue him. Surely she would see Ennek’s value even if he had failed in his task. Miner knew she wouldn’t bother with him. What possible use was he to anyone? Except as a slave, of course. He might fetch a few coins at market.
    Three hundred years earlier, when he had been sentenced to a millennium in Stasis to be followed by the rest of his life as a bond-slave, he’d simply been numb with the shock of it all. Stasis was the fate of mythical villains in tales told by his older brothers to frighten him, not his fate. And a thousand years! That wasn’t even a real number. It was like saying that something was as hot as the sun or as heavy as a mountain. It couldn’t possibly have any meaningful application to him. He’d really been more focused at the time on the anguish he’d caused his own family, not to mention the lingering grief he’d still felt over Camens’ death.
    The truth of what was going to happen to him had only begun to sink in—apt term, that—when he was dragged in chains through the Keep, through the very corridors he had only recently patrolled as Guard, and then hurried down the endless steep stairs that led Under. The Wizard and the recently healed Chief had taken him to a cell, where the Wizard had uttered a few words that had made the clothing disappear from Miner’s body. He’d been mortified to be exposed, and in front of a woman at that, but there was nothing he could do about it, not with his wrists bound tightly behind his back and two members of the Guard holding him in place. He knew those men. He’d worked with them, not so long ago. Sometimes they’d had drinks together at a pub. Now their faces were as set as stone and their eyes as cold as ice.
    It was cold in the cell, so cold he was shivering and his bones ached with it. Then the Guards had forced him to his knees and the Wizard had taken a razor to his scalp, shearing him of every last hair. He never knew why: The rest of the hair on his body had fallen off while he was in Stasis and had only recently grown back. Perhaps the shaving was meant as another way to humiliate him.
    When he was bald, the Guards had hauled him across the stone floor and manhandled him into a large stone basin filled with stinking water. He’d tried to struggle, even knowing it was useless, but after a moment the Wizard had paralyzed him with a quick gesture and a few muttered words.
    He hadn’t begged for mercy, at least. He was grateful for that, especially since he knew very well he wouldn’t get it.
    Just a few moments later, though, the Wizard had begun the incantation that would put him in Stasis, and he’d spent the next 300 years drowning. It had never occurred to him then to wonder to what use he’d be put when he awoke.
    And then he did awake—and gods, there were no words for the relief he’d felt at being released—and he’d found himself in a man’s bed. He’d heard a few whispered tales over the years of bond-slaves being used sexually, even though such a thing was strictly forbidden, and he’d assumed at first that sex