Thinking about a dark medieval fantasy au (fear and hunger vibes) with ghost
You’re shunned. It doesn’t really matter why. You are an outcast of the highest order. Which leaves your prospects limited.
You work as something of a keeper in the castle dungeons. You work under the resident torturer, making sure the prisoners are fed and bandaged so they do not die before they’re allowed to. You have heard all manner of begging, been bruised by grasping, desperate hands— all wanting mercy, freedom, or some manner of quick death.
There is one prisoner who never begs. He does not speak. He does not cry. If not for the fact that he bleeds, you might not think him human.
The food is not good. It is a tasteless, pale gruel that does nothing more than sustain. He eats it all. The tray is left neatly, no reaching hands, no cursing or spitting as you retrieve it.
This prison has changed him. It’s not just the torture. It’s the darkness. The ceaseless, unyielding darkness. It’s the forbidden magic being used to keep him alive so he might suffer that much longer. His body is hardened and pale, his eyes dark and shineless.
You do not realize it, but you have become his only tether to reality. The only part of his world without pain. Your appearance is the only way he can mark time. The only way he can remember what a human being is meant to look like. The only time he receives anything but punishment and agony. He will admit— he’s thought of throttling you and squeezing the last breath from your throat. To prove to himself that the nightmare is real. To feel something fragile in his palms one last time. To touch your skin and remember the sun.
But he also sees the mottled bruises on you and he knows that a beast without purpose or master must be put down. The gnawing hunger drips slow, like sap, through the grooves and crevices of his poisoned mind, eroding the riverbeds until all his wants meld into one flooding stream.
He wants food. He wants flesh. He wants affection. He wants sex. He wants sunlight. He wants blood. He wants revenge. He wants life. He wants death. He wants to taste burnt sugar. And he cannot shake the idea that all of those roads start and end with you.
The shackles that hold him and the stones they’re bolted in only grow weaker while his desire is making him grow stronger.