What a uniquely terrible torture. What genius had thought this up? The point was, surely, to inundate him with the despair of every other poor soul who had been imprisoned here, to fill him with such unfathomable sadness that, when questioned, he would give up anyone and anything to make it stop. But these whispers were redundant. They did not darken his thoughts; they merely echoed them. Ramy was dead; Hermes was lost. The world could not go on. The future was only a vast expanse of black, and the only thing that gave him a shred of hope was the promise that someday, all this would end.
