Chapter Text
Everything hurt.
Isidore Toller was barely conscious of a swinging, repetitive movement, as he was being transported to somewhere unknown. He couldn’t see anything and all he knew was that he was curled up, couldn’t move much and everything hurt, like he was pinched by a thousand little needles on his back, arms and legs.
How did a respectable man of intellect like him find himself in that situation? This was uncomfortably new and he couldn’t stay there.
He tried to struggle but he felt like he couldn’t bring his arms forward and couldn’t bend his legs: he was trapped in a too tiny space to do that. He had never been scared of small spaces before and never really understood claustrophobic people, until then. He could feel panic raising fast.
But he was smart, or at least he thought so of himself. All he had to do was to maintain control and find a solution to his problem as soon as possible.
He tried to regulate his breath and focus on his foggy thoughts.
First of all: what could he feel? It was dark, he was sitting in a very cramped and closed space, his wrists and ankles were bound by what seemed to be some ropes and he was gagged. He could faintly smell the salty scent of the sea. The walls felt wooden and circular. With all of these clues he could guess that he might be in… a barrel? On a boat, maybe?
But how? Why? He knew he could find a solution, he always did. Why was he here?
The last thing he could remember was from the celebratory dinner he went to with some of his inquisitor colleagues... and between them there were also a couple of new faces, the new doctors of the team. They were celebrating the conviction of a new sorcerer, a woman who used forbidden magic to erase the memories of the people she abused. A scum, like all the others that came before her.
He ate and drank well, toasting to the Inquisition… the new doctors specifically offered him a drink that looked red and warm. It was sweet and a bit alcoholic, with a bitter accent at the end.
It was totally unassuming at the time but the memories that came after were… foggy. He could remember that he started slowly feeling unwell, he stopped eating and the doctors offered to accompany him home. He must have passed out not long after.
Did they poison his drink? Was he kidnapped? He knew he had a lot of enemies but he never imagined that they could crawl and hide inside the Inquisition itself like some kind of parasite.
His breath, already irregular, became frantic.
He wanted to go out. He had to go out of that barrel. With a renewed strength he struggled uselessly against the bounds and when he didn’t succeed in freeing himself, he tried to straighten his legs and hit with his head the lid of the barrel. There was a moment of silence where he thought that all that he got was a worse headache, but then he felt a blow to the barrel coming from outside, and a moment after all the world was spinning, presumably because the barrel had fell and rolled a little.
Isidore felt glad when it stopped. He might have puked if it kept going any longer.
“Stay calm, inquisitor Toller” said a voice outside the barrel “we’re almost at our destination. And when we’ll arrive we’ll get you out of here. That is if you behave. Sounds nice to you?”
Isidore couldn’t answer even if he wanted to: the gag made him make just a strangled noise that he doubted would be audible outside of his wooden prison.
At least someone knew he was there, and that meant he wasn’t left for dead forever yet. And they wanted to get him out of there, so whatever ill intentions they might have had towards him, he could buy at least some time to understand the situation and maybe escape.
He wanted to go home.
He had a name in his homeland, certainly someone was already looking for him. And he was confident that he could get out of this situation one way or another.
Despite the pain and the fear, it didn’t take long for his already foggy consciousness to drift away and make him pass out again.