The old man whispered gently; melodically.
“Drip, drop.
Drip, drop.
Slow wet drips on salty rock.
Measurements of time now lost.
Chilly breath leaves icy frost,
Frothy exhales. Bloody cough...”
“Cough, cough”, the man hacked. Accidentally imitating his own verse.
He quickly recovered.
“How long have I been in this place?
How long will my chest ache?
How worn before, it, breaks?”
Duramarth sat naked and alone, in total and utter darkness. He slid his fingers across the cold stone floor carefully, shakily, until his hand found the clay bottle. He strained to lift his head before tilting back the bottle of honey wine.
Bottles of wine and rotten meat. That is what the prospector had been living on for the last two weeks. Or was it months? Years perhaps? No, no. Of course not. “Weeks”, he concluded. He had been counting the steady droplets of water, dripping off the rocks above his prison. Or tomb, he thought.
A drop every three minutes. Twenty drops per hour. Four hundred eighty drops per day.
It wasn't the counting that was difficult. Although the wine most-assuredly made him miss some counts along the way. It was that every day he would wake and his clay jug was full of mead. More meat heaped on his plate. This was maddening. His prison was small. No more than five meters out in any direction from his center. He had felt around methodically. Precisely. Searching for an exit. A trap door. A seam of some sort. Something he could begin to exploit for an attempted escape.
It was no use. Every day his stock would replenish but he never heard a sound of another creature. Not a footstep, or creak or kicked rock. Only the steady drips of water; only the echoes of his own unanswered screams.
