lantairvlea | Saving Kallon

I know, I'm being lazy on the formatting, sorry! Time is for typing, not formatting! Especially when I'm working 8-hour plus days (counting travel between clients).

The second man stood as she approached. “Not much to see right now, he's asleep. He's usually out for a few days after a session. The last one was yesterday, but you never know, he might wake up.”
Sessions and Kallon incapacitated for days afterwards. She tried to breathe the tension out of her jaw and tucked her hands into her robe pockets as she approached them. She knew working constructs exhausted her, Kallon might not be any different. When she tried to work more than she should have been capable of, it had left her unconscious for days and took nearly two weeks to fully recover.
The men stepped to the side, both of them to her left, the vacant chair between them and the wall beside the doorway.
She braced for what might be on the other side of the construct that blocked the entry to the room. The room was small, not even ten feet square. There was a cot on the far wall. She inhaled sharply upon seeing the figure laying awkwardly upon the cot. Like he had been dumped upon it and too exhausted to change positions.
“You get used to it,” the auburn-haired man said. “He stopped taking his human form weeks ago.”
The man’s assumption that Sray was reacting to Kallon being in his natural form could not have been more wrong. Even with the slight distortion of the construct, it was clear he was in awful shape. He only had his fur to cover him. It was dull and looked unkempt. His hair was matted and the hard edge of bones showed where thick, smooth muscle should have been.
Sray couldn’t bring herself to say anything. Her hand found the back of the chair to her right. She barely felt the weight of it as she lifted it from the ground, or the force of it connecting with the men as they shouted in surprise and were slammed into the wall together. She brought down the chair again, breaking it into smoking, charred pieces over the cursing men. One of them was collapsed on the floor, the other was scrambling to his feet towards the stairs, bleeding from a cut on his head.
Thelus suddenly filled the stairwell. A strangled yell died in the man's throat. Thelus dragged the limp body and dropped him next to the other unconscious man.
"Sedative." Thelus held out his hand to Sray and she quickly handed him the syringes that she had intended to use instead of the chair.
"What's goin' on?" The words were low and rough with a rumbling growl underlying them that made the voice almost unrecognizable.
"Kalva, we're getting you out," Sray replied in Getie'an and went to the miserable little room's opening.
"Sray?" He blinked, disbelief flashed before being replaced with desperate panic. "No!" He lurched off the cot and crumpled, cursing to the floor. "Get out, go! You can't be here!"
Kallon. Strong, brave, rebellious, relentless Kallon was terrified, weak, and broken. She swallowed the lump that suddenly felt huge in her throat. “We’re getting you out.” She kept her voice tightly controlled, nearly choking on the tremors that threatened her ability to speak. She knelt before the construct blocking the door and shoved her hands onto it, forcing herself to focus on the structure. The closest thing to it was the wall Engama’s founders had built to banish the klamon from the valley. It was woven into the walls, floor, and ceiling. Thicker than the doorframe and dense it had no consistent pattern. It was the work of many Meim together making it more complex to dismantle.
Kallon slumped against the room’s concrete wall close to, but not touching the construct, breathing heavily. “You can’t, it takes three of them hours to remove it.”
“We don’t have to remove the whole thing, just a hole big enough to get you out.” She got to work, loosening the bonds and releasing them to the air.
The was a pair of thumps and the door slamming amidst some disgruntled Mekhdae’an grumbling from Thelus.
Kallon stiffened and stared towards the noise. “Who’s that?”
Thelus was still out of Kallon’s sight behind the wall, taking the existing chair and shoving it under the handle.
“It’s Thelus Shtorpfyl. He’s locking the men in another room.”
Thelus placed his hands on the doorframe and ran it along the crack, sealing the door to its frame and then the floor. Sray continued her frustratingly slow work of prying apart the construct holding Kallon prisoner.
“How did you find me?” He closed his eyes and pressed his head against the wall.
“Jona and Dantel told us what happened.”
Kallon sighed in relief. “I wasn’t sure they actually let them go.”
“Yes, they gave your attackers some trouble, too, setting the horses loose and destroying their harnesses, giving us another clue.” She was quiet a moment, then added, “you have good friends, Kalva. I didn’t realize how good they were before.”
“They would have tried to fight for me, but they couldn’t. They couldn’t deal with these things, not with five of them.”
There was silence. Words stumbled around in Sray’s mind, not sure what the best thing to say was.
Thelus crouched beside her. “Do you need a break?” He was using that low, soothing tone he had with skittish horses.
Sray pressed her lips together. If she stopped, she wasn’t sure she would hold it together.
“Don’t wear yourself out, Voo,” Kallon whispered in Ela’yan, it almost sounded like he was talking in his sleep.
“Alright,” she only moved over enough to give him access to the disappointingly small hole she had made.
Thelus glanced at Kallon and the older man’s face tightened. The movements of his hands as he worked were sharp and aggressive. Thelus was slow to anger, but he held a cool rage. “The councilmen can’t get here fast enough.”
“They’re on the way,” Sray said. “I don’t think they were more than a day behind us if Hafitch Mishor is right.”
Thelus continued working and there was silence again. Kallon looked like he had fallen asleep, half-propped against the wall, looking at least a little more comfortable than he had on the cot. The minutes ticked by until the hole was as wide as Thelus’ shoulders and four inches deep.
“I’m sorry it took so long,” Sray said in Ela’yan. She wasn’t sure Kallon could here, but she needed to say it. “Triden covered his tracks, he didn’t dare step foot in Engama’s territory, but he wasn’t dumb enough to do it in his own.”
Kallon stirred slightly and his eyelids fluttered.
“We spent too long looking in the wrong place. The school attached to Dendrin wasn’t the right one. It was a dead end.”
“They knew I was going,” he said. “It was a trap.”
“I know. We haven’t worked out all the details of how they managed it, but we found you and I’m here and you’re getting out.”
Kallon pushed himself up to sit against the wall on shaky arms. “What day is it? Is it even day? They leave these cursed lights on all the time. I don’t even know how they power them.”
Sray hadn’t even registered the electric lights, but she stared at the bulb that dangled from the hateful little room’s ceiling through squinting lids. “It’s the 18th of Remeseft.”
“Weil het,” he whispered. “Remeseft.” He closed his eyes again. “Five months.” He shouldn’t have been surprised. It felt like an eternity. It could have been years for all he knew before Sray told him otherwise. As much time as he spent unconscious, possibly for hours that sometimes stretched into days and how the days blended completely indiscernible from each other for stretches only broken by sleep. Uncounted and uncountable for the lack of sun and feel.
Five months felt like too long, but at the same time impossibly short in that eternal, endless hole of despair and rage they had sealed him inside. Nearly have a year gone, lost, stolen, ripped from his life and replaced with a gaping, broken hole. All the edges were jagged and painful and raw in ways he never thought possible. And now, impossibly, Sray was here and he prayed that she would remain undetected.
“I’m sorry it took so long,” Sray repeated, breaking into his thoughts.
“Almost through,” Thelus said. His gestures as he burrowed through the barrier had smoothed some.
It wasn’t long after that he made a final, sharp movement with his hands. “Finished.”
He moved over to allow Sray access. She knelt and bent forward, reaching through the hole. Kallon’s grip was weak, but they latched arms and he pushed weakly with his legs against the floor and she pushed against what was left of the barrier with her feet.
“Rohsh Shur, what have they done to you, Kallon?”
He was breathing heavily again. She wrapped her arms around him and he clutched back at her and let out a horrible, muffled wail of a sob into her chest. His smell was strong and greasy, but that wasn’t the only reason her eyes were watering. He must have lost close to forty pounds of muscle. His skin stretched over his bones. She wanted to sit there and hold him and be swallowed in the mixture of joy at finding him and despair and rage at what he had been through.
“We need to go,” Thelus said carefully. “The sedatives only last so long.”

“They made constructs right in front of them? They shouldn’t have known Kallon was selected and they couldn’t have known about Dantel. That’s unbelievable.” Sherodd shook his head.