Nine years, eleven months, three weeks, and six days if he's counted right.
He knows he hasn't.
The days slipped through his fingers, grains of sand between them, and he'd long since forsaken his mind.
He hears shouting from what he'd imagine to be the courtyard far, far below and to the left.
It's distant as it is frenzied.
He ignores it all the same; for years now, his senses have betrayed him—phantom guards reaching into the cell to offer him keys,
the scrape of food trays never delivered, and whispers, horrible, beautiful whispers of a song that only he had ever heard,
none of it real.
None of it.
And yet, this time, he's inclined to trust the three pounds of fat prisoner in a cage of bone he calls his brain.
The roar's undeniable.
And it begins with the tides.
The thin sliver of ocean he could only ever glimpse from between the bars has risen,
swelling far beyond its bounds.
The crashing waves hammer at the cliffs below, a deafening chorus of intolerant berating.
The tower itself shudders as the sea climbs higher, each surge booming as though Lumen were collapsing under its weight.
Celtor is drowning.
Soon, the ocean pours into his cell, its tides cold and unyielding as he'd remembered.
It rushes in, filling every gap in the stone and every inch once graced by the stale air.
He watches as though spectating from outside as the water swallows his world.
As it reaches his chest, he wades to the center of the room, staring with tired eyes up at the grate in the ceiling.
That spark of will returns as it never had, a single instinct to escape.
As the water climbs to his chin, he begins to bash his shoulders against the grate.
Again.
Again.
His body protests, his lungs scream for air, and yet he has no plan to stop—not until the metal, brown with rust,
pries loose with a groan and he can wrest what he can of himself into open air.
For the first time in what has become of his life, he breathes the outside world.
That spark flickers as the accordion saturates his mind once more.