Unable to move, unable to die.
He couldn’t see, hear, feel, smell or taste.
This was isolation in its purest form. Loneliness inescapable. No rescue, no relief, no companionship, no comfort, and no end.
How long had he been there? A million years, merely a week? Another agony was that in his sightless, soundless state, he could not even measure time.
He would never again know fresh air, a good meal or the touch of a warm hand.
*
“Make me immortal,” he yelled at the Djinn, and it granted his wish.
He gleefully drank down every poison, feeling no ill effects. He had his armed guards charge at him, and even the sharpest blade never pierced his skin.
His enemies could do no harm. He would outlive them all and his reign could stand for a millennium, maybe even an eternity.
Alas this wasn’t destined to be. In little more than a year, the rebel Shahriyar rose and seized the throne.
He soon stood before this usurper king when the executioners failed to end his life.
“Immortal?” the pragmatic Shahriyar pondered “Never touched by violence, disease, or age? Oh, that is unlucky, for death can be a merciful exit.”
And in those brown eyes, a glint of sadism flickered.
*
They took him by ship to the middle of the ocean where he was placed into a barrel and the barrel was filled with a grey sludge that soon hardened. He was struck by the panic of enclosure, the agony of suffocation and the primal urge to break free but he knew he couldn’t.
He felt the barrel sink to the bottom of the sea and knew this was to be his resting place for a very long time.
“You’ll never escape” Shahriyar had said “no one can rescue you. And really why would they? You were never loved, only feared.”
So, he lay in his prison, with the weight of a million gallons crushing down upon him. Would the creatures of the sea eat away at the wood, would the waters erode the cement?
His body was wrenched in agony. Itchy, dizzy, and hot. Relief was unattainable. But as time passed, he forgot he even was a body, as the utter hopelessness broke his soul.
He was now nothing but a mind that could never escape itself, a prisoner in the land of silence and darkness.
This was the rest of his life. And it would never end.
