The Witness
The prisoner who speaks without stopping
A prisoner held in the sub-cellar longer than anyone can precisely account for. She is not chained — she does not need to be. She sits and speaks continuously, in a voice so level it takes minutes to hear it as language at all, repeating certain phrases with the rhythm of liturgy. The Order calls her the Witness, which here is no honour: it means someone who saw what they should not have, and survived in a form that makes silence inconvenient.
Description
The Witness sits in the centre of her small cell and talks without cease — fragments, interrupted syntax, sequences that begin as sense and veer into something that sounds like another language entirely. She has said these things so long that the stones seem soaked in them. Most of it is gibberish by any ordinary measure.
And then, rarely, she looks up, and her eyes are shockingly lucid, and she speaks in an entirely different voice — slow, precise, wholly sane — before letting the liturgy resume as though it never paused. She is a figure to be pitied, feared, and listened to very carefully, because buried in her ceaseless recitation are things that are true.