From the very day we first breathed the dusty air of the keep, I knew doom would plague the innocence of our souls. The sweet, effervescent smell that spread amongst us gave the horrid sensation of life when despair was its true insinuation. Hard floor beneath my feet and cool steel walls beneath my touch told me of the thousand escapes never to succeed. The imprisonment was disenchanting, but we were given everything we needed for survival: food, water, clothing, and showers. These were, of course, the commodities blessed by death and used only by the wishful.

The dwellings of our strange cage consisted of rooms spanning the dimensions of about 3,000 square feet. More than enough bunks filled the very vacant rooms for sleep and even pillows lined them, giving their attempts at luring us from the cold, cruel reality of fear. A kitchen took up a large portion of the space, particularly with its oversized pantry holding food to last us for years. The stove worked wonderfully and chopped wood spoiled us with a laziness no one had. We could not have asked for more, but we certainly could have used less. This was the joyless place we tried to make home, but home, peace, was something that would never be known again, not with these memories.

Considering the level of the keep where we lived as the first floor, numerous other floors descended below us. We knew of five of those floors, though we knew several more existed. A stairway alternated its location upon each floor, making a difficult descent and a unique, indirect path. Each subsequent floor was also larger than its predecessor, having higher ceilings, larger rooms, and longer staircases. The most haunting attribute of this abominable structure was that the further you went down, the brighter it got, and this light was no cause of electricity or fire; this light was the evil of dawn spawned into its most sinister, incarnate form.

(Listen to the rest)