Private The Exile

[Pillar of Hope]

Undisclosed Location
Cassian Abrantes
​

The cell had no business being called a room. It was a hole with walls.

Stone sweated with old damp, though no rain had touched this place in years. Mud lay thick across the floor, black and foul, churned by boots and bodies and the slow drag of chains. Somewhere beyond the bars, metal groaned against metal. A man screamed once, sharp and ragged, and was answered by laughter that rolled down the corridor like loose gravel. The air reeked of rust, mildew, blood, and the sour remains of beings who had long ago stopped expecting mercy.

This was not a place where innocence survived. It was not even a place where lesser sins endured. Murderers rotted here. Thieves with blasters tucked under their pillows. Slavers. Butchers. Beings who had carved names for themselves in blood and fear and found, in the end, that there was always somewhere lower to fall. The kind of forgotten world that drifted at the edge of civilized charts, where no Republic patrol came willingly and no Imperial officer stayed unless ordered at gunpoint. A dead place. An unforgiving place. The sort of place built to break whatever was thrown into it.

Cassian Abrantes woke face down in the mud.

Consciousness returned to him by degrees, each one crueler than the last. First came pain, deep and pounding, spreading through his skull like a hammer striking from the inside. Then the ache in his ribs. Then the taste of iron in his mouth. His hands twitched weakly beneath him, fingers sinking into wet filth as he dragged in a shallow breath and immediately regretted it. Even breathing hurt.

For a long moment, he did not move. He simply lay there, cheek pressed into the cold muck, listening to the distant clatter of chains and the muted hum of some dying power conduit hidden in the walls. His dark hair was matted with mud. Blood, some dried and some fresh, traced one side of his face. Every inch of him felt heavy, as though his body no longer quite belonged to him.

Then memory flashed, not cleanly, but in fragments. His speeder, the violent lurch of impact. Voices he did not know. Hands hauling him back before darkness swallowed the rest.

Cassian forced one eye open. The world blurred, then sharpened just enough to make out the crooked lines of durasteel bars in front of him and the dim amber glow of a failing light overhead. No furnishings. No blanket. No cot. Just stone, mud, and confinement. The eldest son of House Abrantes had been thrown into the dirt like carrion.

Slowly, with visible effort, he pushed one palm against the ground and tried to rise. His arms trembled under the strain. Pain tore through his side so sharply that black spots burst across his vision, and he nearly collapsed again. A bitter breath left him through clenched teeth. He stayed on one knee, shoulders heaving, mud dripping from his hands.

Outside the cell, footsteps approached at an unhurried pace. Cassian lifted his head.

A shadow stretched long across the corridor before its owner came into view, distorted by the crooked bars and the poor light. Somewhere farther down, another prisoner muttered to himself in a language broken by missing teeth. A chain rattled once more and the whole miserable place seemed to hold its breath.

Cassian wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and looked toward the sound, battered and filthy, but with something in his eyes that had not yet been beaten out of him.

Whatever this place was, whatever pit of the galaxy they had buried him in, it had not taken that.

Not yet.

No, not yet.

 

[Cassian Abrantes]

Pillar of Hope ​

Days passed without shape or mercy. Cassian measured time by meals shoved through the slot, by guard rotations, by the failing hum of old machinery in the walls. The darkness in that place did not simply surround him. It studied him. It waited for him to weaken. The prison around him had already begun its slow work on his body and mind

By what he guessed was the sixth day, the pain had settled into something constant and dull. His ribs burned instead of stabbed. Hunger hollowed him out. Weakness frightened him more than anything else. Pain meant he was still fighting. Weakness meant the cell was winning.

So he watched.

He counted footsteps. He learned the rhythm of the guards. One limped. One struck the bars as he passed. One moved quietly and lingered longer than the others. Cassian listened to gates opening somewhere deeper in the structure and rebuilt the prison in his mind from echoes and guesswork. It was not much, but it was something to hold onto.

The other prisoners were worse to watch.

Some screamed. Some begged. Some whispered to themselves until their voices broke. Others simply stared at nothing. Cassian saw what this place did to men who stayed too long. It stripped them down until nothing remained but waiting.

Helplessness settled into him like a second skin.

Still, he forced himself upright when he could. He cleaned the blood from his face. He held his silence when guards passed. The name Abrantes still meant something to him, even here in the mud where nothing else seemed to matter.

 

[Cassian Abrantes]

Pillar of Hope ​

Another two days passed before Cassian saw the sky.

He had almost forgotten what open space felt like. When they dragged the prisoners into the rec yard, the sudden stretch of distance around him felt unreal, as though the walls should have closed again at any moment. The yard itself was nothing more than a hard packed square of dirt surrounded by high fencing and rusted plating that climbed too high for hope and too thick for escape. Forty or fifty yards across at most. Just enough room to remind the prisoners what movement used to feel like before taking it away again.

Even there, the prison remained.

Guards watched from elevated walkways with rifles resting easily in their hands. Shock posts stood at the corners. The gates stayed locked. No one spoke loudly. No one ran. No one laughed.

Freedom did not live in that yard. Only the illusion of it.

Cassian stood still at first, letting the air move across his face. It carried dust instead of rot. That alone felt strange. He could feel the weakness still living in his limbs, the ache in his ribs, the pull of healing cuts across his shoulders. Days in the cell had not made him stronger. They had only made him quieter.

He watched the others the same way he always did.

Some prisoners paced the perimeter like caged animals trying to remember how distance worked. Others stayed close to the walls, unwilling to trust open ground. A few gathered in tight circles, speaking low, their eyes always moving toward the guards above.

That was when he saw the older man.

He had noticed him before through the bars across the corridor. Thin. Grey haired. Slower than the others. The kind of prisoner the strong chose when they needed someone weaker to remind themselves they still had power. Two men closed in on him near the far side of the yard where the guards watched less closely. Their movements were casual. Practiced, no shouting and certiainly no warning.

The older man tried to step away. One of them struck him anyway.

He went down hard and Cassian didn't think.

His body moved before the prison inside his head had time to argue with him. He crossed the yard quickly, ignoring the warning voice that had been growing in him since his first day here. The voice that said survive first. Stay quiet. Stay unnoticed.

One of the attackers turned just as Cassian reached them.

Cassian drove his shoulder into him and sent him stumbling sideways. The second man swung without hesitation. Cassian took the blow across his jaw and answered with one of his own. The impact sent pain through his ribs so sharp his vision flashed white, but he did not stop. He pulled the older prisoner back behind him and stepped forward again.

The fight did not last long. It never did in places like this.

Guards shouted from above. Rifles shifted. A warning bolt struck the dirt near their feet and the attackers backed off immediately. Not because they feared Cassian. Because they feared the rifles.

Hands seized him moments later.

They dragged him across the yard while the older man remained where he had fallen, breathing but alive. Cassian did not look back. He already knew what was coming.

Compassion had a cost in this place.

They tied him in the square where everyone could see him.

The post stood in the center of the yard like a marker for something buried beneath the dirt. Prisoners were forced to watch. Guards gathered without hurry. One of them uncoiled the whip slowly, almost carefully, as though preparing a ritual instead of a punishment.

Cassian's hands were bound above him, he didn't struggle, that was pointless.

The first strike tore across his back like fire.

He felt it more than heard it. The sound came a moment later. A sharp crack that echoed against the fencing and died quickly. His body jerked despite himself. Breath left him in a hard rush he could not stop.

The second followed before he could recover, then the third.

Each strike landed deeper than the last. The whip bit through fabric, through skin, through whatever strength he had managed to gather over the past days. Heat spread across his back and down his sides. His fingers tightened against the bindings. His jaw locked so hard it hurt.

He did not cry out, not at first. By the fifth strike his legs trembled beneath him. By the eighth the world had begun to narrow.

By the tenth he could no longer feel where one wound ended and the next began. There was only burning. Only the sound of the whip cutting air. Only the taste of blood in his mouth where he had bitten down too hard.

Still he remained upright. The eleventh strike drove the breath out of him completely. The twelfth broke whatever strength remained.

Darkness surged up without warning. His knees failed. His head dropped forward. The yard, the guards, the watching prisoners all vanished at once as his body finally gave in to what it had been enduring since the first lash fell.

He never felt those that followed.

Cassian Abrantes hung motionless against the post as the punishment finished around him, unconscious before it ended, his back torn open and his body barely held upright by the bindings.

He had not stepped forward expecting reward. Cassian stepped forward because it was the right thing to do. In this place, that was enough to earn him pain.

 

[Cassian Abrantes]

Indirect: Sibylla Abrantes
​

Days stretched into something harsher than time. His wounds healed slowly, badly, and then were opened again when the guards decided he had recovered enough to endure another lesson. The lashes came fewer now, but never without warning. Never without purpose. The prison did not punish him to kill him.

It punished him to see how long he would last.

One of the guards asked him once, standing just beyond the bars while Cassian leaned against the wall with dried blood across his shoulders and mud still clinging to his hands.

"Why will you not die."

The question was not mocking. It was almost curious.

Cassian lifted his head slowly.

"People have been trying to kill me for years," he said, his voice rough but steady. "Kings have tried and failed."

For a brief moment, uninvited and unwelcome, another face crossed his thoughts.

Aurelian's smug smile.

Cassian wondered, distantly, whether it bothered him somewhere out there in the wider galaxy that he was still alive. Whether it sat wrong with him that Cassian Abrantes was not dead. If it did, then perhaps that alone made the suffering worth something.

Yes....

Kings had tried and kings had failed.

The guard stepped closer after that, too close. Close enough to study him as though he were some stubborn animal refusing to lie down.

Cassian spat in his face and the reaction was immediate. Their hands reached for him. But Cassian moved first.

He surged forward before they could secure his arms, driving into the nearest man with the full weight of his body. Weak as he was, there was still strength left in him. Enough, his shoulder struck hard. His hand found the guard's throat. He twisted.

The crack of the man's neck echoed sharply inside the corridor.

Another came at him from the side. Cassian seized a jagged strip of loose metal from the wall where the plating had begun to peel away from rusted fasteners. He drove it forward without hesitation.

The shard punched deep into the second guard's throat. The man dropped instantly, choking on his own breath. A third grabbed him from behind.

Cassian turned into the hold, forcing space between them with his elbow, then his forearm locked across the man's neck. He tightened his grip and held it there. Held it longer than the guard expected. Longer than the struggle lasted. Longer than the movement beneath his arm meant anything.

Only when the body sagged did Cassian release him. For a single breath, the corridor belonged to him.

Then the others arrived, too many.

Blaster stocks struck him across the ribs and shoulders. Hands seized his arms. Someone drove a knee into the back of his leg and forced him down into the mud again. Another blow caught the side of his head and sent light flashing across his vision. The strip of metal fell from his fingers.

They dragged him back against the wall and held him there.

Cassian did not resist anymore. Blood ran down his back again where the half healed lashes had split open during the fight. His breathing came hard, but steady. His eyes remained clear.

Even now, even after everything.

Even here, he was still alive.

 

[Cassian Abrantes]

​

The box they kept Cassian in was barely large enough for him to sit upright, and even that required him to angle his shoulders against the cold metal seams that pressed into his spine like patient knives waiting for him to relax. Rainwater slipped through a narrow fracture somewhere above him, falling one reluctant droplet at a time onto his brow, his lips, or the floor beside him, never where he needed it most, never when he expected it. He had learned to listen for the sound before it fell, timing the rhythm like a starving man memorizing the footsteps of a guard who never arrived with food. The place had stripped him of certainty long before it stripped him of strength, and yet he still lifted his head each time the droplet struck, swallowing what little the sky allowed him.

His ribs still burned from the beating they gave him after he pulled the other prisoner free, and sometimes when he breathed too deeply something inside shifted in a way that made him think one of them had never healed properly. He did not regret what he had done, even now while the punishment echoed through his bones with every movement, because the memory of the stranger's eyes when the door opened had been worth the price they were extracting from him. Whoever ran this place believed mercy was weakness, and they intended to grind that weakness out of him piece by piece until there was nothing left but obedience. Cassian rested his forehead against the cold wall and wondered whether they understood that they were not breaking him at all, only teaching him exactly what kind of enemy they had chosen to make.

Time had stopped behaving like time days ago, stretching itself into something shapeless that refused to move forward yet refused to let him rest inside it, and he had begun counting his breaths instead because numbers still obeyed rules even here. Hunger clawed at him in waves that left his hands trembling and his thoughts drifting toward memories of sunlight on Naboo's water and the quiet strength of House Abrantes that had once anchored him to something larger than survival. He did not know how he was still alive, and the question followed him through every slow breath like a shadow that refused to leave his side, but somewhere beneath the exhaustion there remained a stubborn certainty that his story was not meant to end inside a metal coffin forgotten by the galaxy. The prison was the worst place he had ever endured, yet even here something inside him continued to stand upright where his body could not, waiting for the moment the door finally opened

End Thread​