After Dungeons, written last year, which includes forced imprisonment.

The whimper was the hardest part.

That was… well, it was true, but it was dishonest in its truth.

It was the hardest thing for Tan to do, to make the sound as if she had broken him, to let her thing she was winning.

The hardest thing about this whole process was not letting that whimper be true.

She said it had been a month. He could guess she was close to honest about that. Meals came irregularly, but the dead-eyed man who brought them would say “breakfast” or “Lunch” or “dinner,” even though there was never more than two thin meals in a day and they were almost all the same mush. Tan had counted by the pit of hunger in his stomach, and then he’d counted by the times she visited her other prisoners.

“I suppose I’ll have to leave you in here a year,” their captor had threatened, but Tam was not worried. For one, he could last longer than a year in worse circumstances than this. For another, she did not strike him as the sort who was willing to wait that long.

No, she would come down again long before another month had passed. And then the fun would begin.

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