So when he woke facedown with some man's shoulder digging into his stomach, he wasn't entirely surprised. Even in his groggy, sleep-wrapped state, he recognized one of Gesha's attempts to wake him.
When the bright green lizard-spirit attached to the man's arm turned and hissed at him, that was when he knew something was wrong.
He scrambled for details. The man's boots were crunching on grass, not dirt, so they'd gone off the path. Smoke in the air. Torchlight flickered against the furs the man wore, and a biting chill lingered in the air.
So a Sandviper had taken him in the middle of the night, and had left Fisher territory to bring him somewhere else.
Still drifting as he was, he initially wondered if he could somehow turn this to his advantage. The Sandviper was an enemy, and therefore an honorable target for robbery. Would he have anything on him? Was there some way Lindon could talk his way out of this? Would the Empty Palm disable him, or just make him angry?
As clarity returned, his thoughts changed. Was he headed back to the Sandviper camp? Was this some sort of revenge against Fisher Gesha, or against Yerin? He hadn't personally done anything against the Sandvipers, but now he was going to be treated to a full, painful taste of their powers. Their insidious, venomous powers, which could dissolve flesh like an acid.
He'd dismantled a Sandviper Remnant under Gesha just two days before, and even its dead matter was enough to slowly burn through living flesh. She'd demonstrated on a dead rat.
Worse, she said, the aura they gathered did not kill so quickly. Their Ruler techniques produced a sort of gas that caused seizures, paralysis, and other, less pleasant symptoms. She'd spoken with a shadow in her voice that suggested she'd seen that state entirely too many times.
Now Lindon started to struggle. He'd tried not to, in order to avoid giving away that he'd regained consciousness, but it had become too much. He kept seeing the corpse of the rat, its hair hissing and sizzling away as the flake of Sandviper madra had steadily drilled its way through.
That same madra, in the form of a legged serpent, stared at him from a few inches away. It hissed again, but the sacred artist gave no indication that he cared what Lindon was doing. He trundled along with the consistency of an ox, though with considerably more speed.
It would have been more interesting to Lindon under other circumstances, but while the Sandviper man gave the impression of moving slowly, ground passed beneath him with alarming speed.
He started slowing when sounds of laughter and chatter cut through the night. It had to be the Sandviper camp, though even craning his neck, Lindon couldn't see much more of it than a few temporary buildings and some torch-smoke.
The man walked passed the laughing crowd, taking him to one of the only buildings Lindon had seen in the entire Five Factions Alliance that wasn't made of rough, freshly cut wood. Instead, it was entirely constructed from iron bars, with rings of script spiraling up the length of the bars like creepers on tree trunks.
Hinges squealed as the door opened, and Lindon hit the ground hard and rolled before he came to a stop on his back.
Even the ceiling was made from bars, which must get unpleasant when it rained. If Lindon were left here, where Fisher Gesha and Yerin couldn't find him, he'd have to survive those rainstorms huddling in the corner and bunched up against the cold.
Before the Sandviper closed the door, Lindon scrambled for it. He kicked at the dirt, launching himself forward.
The Gold still didn't say a word. He grabbed Lindon with one hand like scooping up a squirming puppy, then tossed him back inside. The door shut faster this time.
None of the other prisoners made a break for it.
There were only five others inside this cage, though there were other cages on the left and right. He couldn't begin to guess how many total, which he imagined might be useful information if he ever got out of here.
As he rose to shaky feet, trying to get a better look at his surroundings, one of his cellmates raised her head to look at him. She was filthy, shrouded in a ragged blanket, and she stared with one eye. The other was a half-healed mess, shredded by what seemed to be claw marks.
Lindon couldn't meet her good eye. He was too busy staring at her missing one as though it had shown him his own future.
The next one in the cage was a man that revealed a missing arm and, when he turned in his sleep, several missing toes.
The third, a boy about Lindon's age. Half his hair had been seared off, and he stared into the distance with a glassy look.
The fourth and fifth clung to one another so that he couldn't make out the details of one against another, but blood clung to the bars behind them and the floor beneath him.
Wounds surrounded him, a tale of misery and pain etched in flesh. All of these were Golds, he was sure—a weak cloud drifted over the one-eyed woman's head, and one of the couple in the corner seemed to have a tail—and they had suffered like this. What had wounded them would crush a Copper to paste.
He took a breath, calming his disordered thoughts, though it felt like trying to spit water onto a forest fire. He knelt and examined the door, studying the latch and the script together, but so many of the symbols were unfamiliar to him. He recognized something similar to the circle he'd used to ward off Remnants, but with ten times the complexity.
That was it. There wasn't much else to examine. No other tools to use, no threads to pull, just idle time to pass before whatever had shredded the other prisoners' bodies was used on him.
Though when he spent some time thinking about it, he thought he might know what had happened. These must be miners.
When he looked up, the blocky silhouette of the Transcendent Ruins blocked out the moon and a good half of the stars. They were camped right at the base of it—so maybe this wasn't Sandviper territory at all, because all of the five allied factions would want to share access to the Ruins.
The Sandvipers he'd met before had mentioned miners, and Fisher Gesha had told him the story of how dangerous it was to go inside the Ruins to draw scales from the air. She'd suggested a survival rate of less than thirty percent.
Lindon took another look around him as he imagined what had happened to the rest.
Laughter echoed around the camp until it sounded almost like screams...no, those were screams, along with some shouts and the ringing of metal.
He craned his neck, trying to stick his head between the bars—though they were too closely set for that—in order to see down the row of cages and storage buildings.
Another cage, just like the one in which he found himself, was rattling back and forth as its inhabitants threw themselves against the sides. It looked as though it would actually tip over, but a couple of Sandvipers appeared out of nowhere at the final instant. One of them sent two bright green lights flickering into the cage—he couldn't see the details, but it was obviously a technique of some kind—and the other grabbed the cage in both hands.
He heaved, lifting the entire cage off the ground, and then slammed it back down.
The screams had redoubled in intensity, but now other cages were rattling, and more guards were pouring out of nearby shelters.
When the commotion spread closer to him, with Sandviper guards running past him to help, Lindon stepped back. He was getting too detailed of a look at what the Sandviper techniques were doing to prisoner flesh.
And his cage seemed least likely to join in. Not a one of his fellow inmates even looked up.