The night it all began, I had my hands tied behind my back and my eyes blindfolded with black cloth.

They told me it was a test.

They told me my life depended on it.

Knowing what I did. . .I believed them.

My bare feet shuffled against the rough stone floor as the two men led me down the hallway. Luckily, I managed not to trip because the guides, doubling as guards in case I decided to try a blind flight through the decrepit palace, were only holding me lightly on either side, their fingertips barely brushing my skin. It was as if they thought me contagious and deadly.

Perhaps I was. Perhaps they were. Who was to say?

The sound of a door opening to my left caused me to raise my head in response -- but I couldn’t see anything. My eyes were still veiled by darkness.

Then, suddenly, the cloth was falling away from my eyes. . .and the sight of a thousand flickering points of light flared to life in my vision. I winced in response and squinted to see dozens of candles in the room I now inhabited. When I looked to my right, however, there were no candles; only a bed, stacked with enough mattresses that I could barely see the ceiling, stood there.

My first instinct was to run. It was madness to have a bed that high in a room like this. Then again. . .they were the mad ones. I had known that all along, ever since they captured me so many weeks before.

Warily, I turned my gaze to the man on my left -- and he smiled at me slightly. . .almost as if he were trying to be encouraging. The glint in his dark eyes, however, told me all I needed to know: whatever test there was, they didn’t expect me to pass.

I stuck my chin out stubbornly even though my plummeting stomach was already telling me I had lost.

“You just have to sleep up there,” he said, pointing to the strange arrangement of a bed, “and pull the bell cord if you feel anything.”

“Feel what?” I asked dubiously. Now a part of me felt real fright. What did they expect me to do beyond sleeping and trying not to have nightmares about them?

The dark eyes glinted like stars winking in a night sky. “You’ll see.”

Then, before I could say another word, the two men disappeared into wisps of smoke. . .and I was alone.

I would have been fine. . .if all the candles, the only sources of light within the room overwhelmed by the high bed, hadn’t extinguished only a second later.

Panic overwhelmed me, causing my heart to pound rapidly and my breath to come in shallow spurts. I hated the dark. . .even more than I hated them.

My hands reached out for darkness, touching nothing but the despair of emptiness, until I felt the cool wood of the door underneath my fingertips. Even as my fingers scrambled for a knob, I knew it was no use. They would have locked me in. They liked entrapment. They liked fear.

They liked me to feel trapped and afraid.

Once my fingers, bruised and likely bloodied, tired of their work on the door, I leaned my forehead against the wood and let my heart slow its pounding to a mere trickle of a pulse. I sighed and wondered if today was the night that I would finally perish at the hands of my captors.

My knees nearly sank beneath me as I realized that death could be looming just beyond the darkness.

No, I told myself. Don’t think that way. There has to be something. . . .

My eyes, having slowly adjusted to the shadows, flicked to the looming shape of the stacked mattresses. Should I do what they said? If I “felt” something and pulled the cord as I had been told -- would they let me out?

Or would there only be more nights of horrid games and fickle amusements ahead of me?

I swallowed and clenched my fingers into fists as my sides. Just do it. There’s no harm. They won’t let you out until morning anyway. . .or I hope they’ll let me out by morning. . . .

Breathing out, I made my way to the mattresses and only stopped once I could feel the coarse fabric underneath me. I took a moment to gain my bearings -- darkness was still everywhere, as far as I could see in my limited vision -- before I started climbing, digging both my hands and feet into the mattresses and hoping that I wouldn’t fall and break my neck.

Climbing could often be difficult -- but it was almost unbearable not to be able to see how far I had to go until I reached the top of the stack.

After a time I couldn’t measure even if I had tried, I finally could feel nothing to grasp. . .and my exhausted body heaved up onto the highest mattress. I sank gratefully into the cushion of it -- only before I registered that there was probably a trap.

Oh no. . . .

I waited with halted breath -- but nothing came. No sound. No attack. Nothing but my heart beating erratically in my chest.

Even after my heart had slowed to a normal rhythm again, the tension in my bones didn’t fade.

Then the words of the black-eyed guide hit me again like a punch to my skull.

You’ll lose your life if you don’t feel something. At best, they’ll retrieve you by dawn and execute you. At worst. . .at worst, they’ll leave you in here forever.

I restlessly tossed and turned, wondering if there was something I was supposed to be doing. Darkness was still all I could see. . .and I had learned long ago that darkness held no comforts for me.

Am I feeling anything? Or am I just imagining it?

I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t feel anything.

What’s real? What isn’t?

Even when I closed my eyes, only the black expanse of my vision greeted me. I couldn’t even conjure up any happy memories -- times of when I had had a family and a life devoid of captors and cells. My mind was a blank hollow space for shadows to fester and consume.

Am I just going insane?

I didn’t reach for the bell chord once that night.

Sleep did not come. Feeling did not come. Nothing came.

I just tossed and turned. . .back and forth. . .back and forth. . .not knowing that the joke was on me.

What I was expected to feel was a tiny pea, no bigger than a pearl from the sea, settled on the ground below my bed of mattresses.

When they showed me the next day. . .I laughed maniacally and held my head within the cage of my hands, keeping the burst of tears from streaking down my face in rivulets of panic and fear.

I haven’t been the same ever since.

- - - - -

(Inspration:  merry_fates -- made up of the writer/author trio of Tessa Gratton, Maggie Stiefvater, and Brenna Yovanoff -- are having a contest with the writing prompt The Princess and the Pea -- and this was my contribution.  I hadn't written anything like this for a while, so it was a nice change.)