over my chest. I don’t want to have to hurt him. He’s one of my favorite prisoners. Most of the others are here for acts of brutality. He’s here for acts of cleverness. I’ve enjoyed many interesting conversations with him over the years.
“I’m supposed to be out! I got my date! I got my date!”
To describe a Demtelf is to describe the impossible. They are round, bouncy little things with eyes all over their heads which makes most aliens they encounter very uncomfortable. Fortunately, they can only see out of two of them at any given time. Unfortunately, you never know which two are active.
They are incredibly wise, and able to access knowledge from all over the universe. This makes them exceptionally difficult to keep imprisoned, as they have a tendency to access that knowledge and use it to escape.
“What date?”
“January 17, 1934.”
“Look it up, would you, Tusk?”
Tusk sighs and walks away muttering about his wall. I am not upset by the wall. Since taking our human prisoner, I have not been upset about hardly anything. It is very un-scythkin of me.
“That’s a date in the ancient past,” Tusk says over the communicator.
“Exactly! That’s my date! I should have been out tens of thousands of years ago.” Ham gesticulates with dozens of brows.
“You get out when I receive notice in this timeline that you’ve been pardoned,” I tell him.
“Time is not linear. It’s circular. You think that’s the past. I know it’s the future.”
“Whatever it is, you need to get out of my wall, and back into your cell.”
“You know this cell is nothing but an illusion, and that you are not a warden of anything besides your own pain,” Ham says with all that wisdom he has at his disposal, wisdom which would be far more compelling if he were not still half sticking out of the wall. If I go inside the cell, I’m going to see his little feet hanging in mid-air, I just know it.
“I know. It’s all an illusion. But it is a persistent one.”
“True,” he admits with a sigh. There is a squelching sound as he slips back through the wall and then a hollow bouncing sound followed by a curse, as he boings from the floor and hits his head on the very persistent illusion of a bed.
We could keep Ham inside the concept of a small glass jar without causing him any extra discomfort, but we do it this way because this is more traditional, and it’s easier to keep track of a physical cell than the concept of one, which tends to get lost in the back of the cabinet among all the other concepts and ideas squirreled away by deviant and punitive species like our own.
Making An Entrance
Hours earlier…
“Warden, your prisoner is here.”
Those words bring me up to the bridge where Tusk is piloting our prison ship. He is second hatched in our clutch, my right hand man, the most reliable entity I know in the entire universe. He is the scythkin who knows where the bodies are buried, and where the keys to locks long lost lie. He and I know more about one another than any two beings have known one another in all time, or at least, that is how it feels.
He gestures to the control panel where a light is flashing to indicate the presence of a ship in our ingress bay. It has been a very long time since that light flashed.
“You happy? You’re getting your own human to punish.”
“This is hardly a day to be happy,” I say, hiding the truth. “It is the anniversary…”
“We cannot mourn forever, Warden,” Tusk says.
We can, and we very well may. The other five of my brood have secluded themselves in their quarters and will not emerge until there is something to kill.
After the tragedy, we swore off breeding. Never again will we destroy a world to allow a place for matriarchs to lay their clutches. Never again will we spawn life into a dark universe. The cost is too high, and the reward too fleeting.
Tusk turns Saya’s picture toward me. She is smiling, a rare expression for a matriarch. She was the rarest of creatures, and her loss is still felt.
Was this always going to be her destiny? Or could I have done something differently to save her? I was the first to hatch, and as such became the dominant broodkin. It was my job to protect Saya, and I failed. Matriarchs are rare creatures, fearsome and