Mold clung to the walls in sheets, accumulated in rivulets between the bricks. The room itself was sick, the mucus ever-flowing. The straw that was the chamber’s carpet sagged in spots, drenched by those horrific droplets; poked and stabbed in others, dried and stiffened by the perpetual cold.

He wore rags, and they did nothing to keep the chill from his skin. His only illumination was a single lamp burning beyond the tiny window in the iron-banded door, and it was never enough for his light-starved vision. Filth, the room’s and his own both, coated him in layers. The grime actually kept him warmer than the rags did.

How long had he been here? Where was here? He’d no way of knowing, and he doubted the guards would tell him even if he were to give them the satisfaction of asking. Weeks might have passed in his pain-drenched fugue; more weeks, perhaps even months, since he came out of it. And in all that time, he had seen nothing but the walls of the cell, no one but the guards who occasionally brought him murky water and gristly gruel. They hadn’t even bothered to interrogate him yet.

And why should they rush? What was the hurry? He looked to his left wrist, chafing beneath the manacle that bound him to the wall. He looked to his right wrist—or rather, where it should have been. Old, encrusted bandages marked off the length of his arm, sheered away midpoint between wrist and elbow by the roaring chain-sword of a Khadoran Man-O-War. His hip throbbed, where he had caught the edge of a brutal battle-axe. Clearly, he was going nowhere. Clearly, he was no threat.

They were right, of course. He was no threat. Not today. Not now.

But maybe, just maybe, tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next.

They had taken his freedom. They had taken his hand.

They hadn’t taken away who he was.

The guards carried guns. And one day, he would remind them that where he commanded, guns obeyed.

Through the pain, through the hunger, through the filth, through the despair, Atherton Gaust stared at the door to his cell, and grinned.