‘Dead-beat! Is it what they call the state of unconsciousness when nothing makes sense except for knowing that the body is failing its owner?’ Ashton mused; his eyelids moving slower than any creature he’s known to exist in their time at that precise tick-tock of the giant clock hung above the ‘wall of rifles’ facing the darkened room of the people who’d captured him the night of the Masquerade Ball. He scooped up in a corner latching to the wall, rugged at the middle and the edges; his energy dissipated thinly to the ground which was swiping away from the left to the right in the fluctuating orangish-yellow-blue lights. Often, the huge sphere above the bars would ring red and a flurry of men would come marching inside pushing through the rifle wall. From short to tall, to heavily bearded to clean shaven, they would surround him pointing their evenly browed eyes at him and sending out a message as clear as a silent grave that he was to sit mute without a movement or he couldn't even