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You Were Only Waiting For This Moment To Arrive
It is 5:02 in Ebreth's dream.
He doesn't usually dream about time, because there's no way to keep track of it in Hell, at least not in the Ar'xhay.
Time doesn't pass there so much as it lurks, slinking so mercilessly through the shadows from nine to five that one hour might have
passed there or forty. And every dream he's had for the past year now has been about Hell. But it's 5:02 now, and Ebreth knows
this because the factory whistle has blown and the devils are going home.
It's almost insulting how fast they leave when the whistle blows. They don't even enjoy this: it's a crummy job and
he bores them. Ebreth feels like he's not even good at suffering. It ought to be a relief when they finally leave him but it's not,
because once the pain dims to comprehensible levels he can hear himself think again, and reliving how he feels about it is almost
worse than reliving the acts. No matter how often Ebreth returns here he still can't convince himself that it will ever end, that he
will ever wake up, that there will ever be anything better. Sometimes he thinks Hell is really about that despair, and everything
else is just a conduit to this point.
At first he doesn't realize he's started to move. Ebreth's hips are shattered, though, and there's only so far you can
get like that without a conscious devotion of effort. One forearm pressing to the cold floor and pulling him slowly, inexorably
forward. Then the other, a painful mockery of a military crawl. Ebreth understands very suddenly what he is doing and
can�t believe he has never done it before.
He relives this over and over, the agony, the despair. His mind won't let go of it. Tarrin says it's psychosis, the
mental equivalent of a scar that will not heal. Schneider thinks it's divine punishment. Grayson said once that you could get so
used to suffering it was easier to beat yourself for them every night than it was to risk hoping for better. Right now it is some
time after five o'clock and Ebreth is dragging his broken body across the metal floor of the Ar'xhay and he is thinking that
maybe the reason he keeps returning here is because he fails every time. Maybe his soul is just circling this place in confusion
waiting for Ebreth to set them both free.
He has reached the wall and he gropes along it until his hand finds Pieret's foot where the priest is hanging from
his chains. Ebreth can not stand but he grips his ankle as he would grip another man's hand. "Are you all right," he rasps at his
cellmate, each word burning in his mouth.
The blind whiteness grows brighter and brighter until it cracks at its edges and falls from the darkened bedroom.
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