At some point—somewhere between my feet going numb, my patience filing a formal resignation, and my soul briefly wandering off to imagine its more fulfilling existence—I became acutely aware that time had stopped behaving like a physical law and started acting more like a petty bureaucrat with a grudge.
We'd been waiting for what felt like approximately seventeen years, though Julius's pocket watch insisted it had only been forty minutes, which only confirmed my long-held suspicion that time is a social construct designed to gaslight people into believing their suffering has measurable limits.
The queue shuffled forward with all the enthusiasm of a funeral procession, each person ahead of us taking their sweet time at the obsidian desk while the rest of us stood there contemplating our mortality, poor life choices, or whatever other thoughts tend to surface when the mind is left alone with nothing but impatience and despair.
I watched with mild horror—the kind that starts as curiosity and gradually evolves into genuine concern—as some figures ahead of us, the ones wearing clothes that implied "poverty" as opposed to "fashion statement," were quietly ushered off to a side room by masked attendants who moved with the efficient discretion of people who did this regularly enough that it had become routine.
What followed were the sounds.
Screaming, specifically. The raw, visceral kind that suggested something was being done to someone that evolution had specifically designed pain receptors to prevent.
It rose and fell in waves, occasionally punctuated by wet, meaty sounds that I tried very hard not to identify but my brain supplied anyway because apparently my imagination was committed to making this experience worse.
Then came the faint dripping—rhythmic, steady, the unmistakable sound of liquid hitting stone in quantities that implied medical intervention had gone either very wrong or very right depending on your perspective and moral framework.
Eventually the screaming would stop—replaced by whimpering, sometimes laughter, that sounded significantly more unhinged than when they'd entered.
The surrounding nobles didn't seem bothered at all by this process.
They carried on without missing a beat, sipping drinks delivered by passing servers, laughing at jokes I couldn't hear, treating the distant sounds of human suffering as mere ambiance—no more noteworthy than the music seeping through the walls.
One nobleman actually yawned during one of the loudest of the screams.
I felt my faith in humanity—already operating on fumes and spite—dip another few percentage points closer to the conclusion that complete extinction might, statistically speaking, be a net positive for the universe.
"This is normal here?" I muttered to Julius, keeping my voice low enough that only our group could hear.
"Apparently," he replied, his face slightly pale. "Oberen's establishment has a... reputation. For flexibility. You can gamble with anything—coin, property, body parts, years of your life if you believe the rumors. Everything has a price, everything can be wagered."
"How progressive," I said dryly. "Really embracing that 'flesh is currency' philosophy. Very avant-garde. I'm sure it does wonders for their reviews."
Just then, the attendant called out "Next!" in a voice that suggested boredom so profound it had achieved transcendence and looped back around to something resembling mild interest.
The man in front of us approached the desk with shuffling steps, his spine bent in several places, creating a posture that looked less like natural aging and more like someone had tried to fold him for storage and given up halfway through.
He wore ragged clothing, clutching at himself with the desperate energy of someone who knew they were about to negotiate from a position of profound weakness.
The attendant at the desk sat perfectly still, wearing a dark tailored suit with a red tie that looked expensive enough to feed a family for a month, his hands folded on the obsidian surface with geometric precision.
His face was handsome, certainly, but when he smiled it never quite reached his eyes—lingering instead on his lips like a mask someone had forgotten to remove.
"Welcome," he said with practiced warmth, "to Oberen's Den. We're delighted to have you. Are you familiar with our establishment's policies?"
The bent man shook his head, his voice coming out reedy and uncertain. "N-no, sir. First time. I heard—I heard you could win enough here to change your life."
"Indeed you can," the attendant confirmed smoothly. "Change it quite dramatically, in fact. Though I should mention that entrance to the casino proper requires a minimum stake of one hundred crowns. Standard policy. Ensures the games maintain a certain... caliber of participant."
I watched the bent man's face cycle through several emotions—hope crashing into panic, panic wrestling with desperation, desperation eventually pinning both into submission—before he stammered out, "I... I don't have any crowns. Not on me. I thought—I heard that—"
"That's no problem at all," the attendant interrupted with that same empty smile, "Anything here can be exchanged for crowns. We accept all forms of collateral—clothing, jewelry, tools, property deeds, promissory notes against future earnings, physical assets both renewable and permanent." He gestured vaguely at the man's body. "Everything has value in the right context."
The bent man's eyes went wide—not with horror like any reasonable person, but with something that looked disturbingly like opportunity. And then, without a shred of shame, without even the courtesy of hesitation that might've implied second thoughts or functioning survival instincts, he began to strip.
Every. Last. Piece.
His shirt came off first, dropping to the marble floor in a heap of stained fabric. Then his pants, removed with fumbling fingers. His undergarments followed—absolutely filthy things that I wished I could un-see but would probably be burned into my memory forever as evidence of humanity's capacity for poor judgment.
Within thirty seconds he stood completely bare in the middle of the waiting room, his pale, malnourished body on full display for everyone present like the world's saddest art installation, his bent spine creating angles that made him look like a lowercase 'r' that had given up on proper posture.
The surrounding nobles didn't even blink. Just continued their conversations like public nudity was a normal Thursday occurrence in their social circles.
The attendant began sifting through the discarded clothing with clinical detachment, lifting each piece between thumb and forefinger like he was handling evidence at a crime scene, examining seams and fabric quality with the practiced eye of someone who'd appraised thousands of desperate people's possessions and found them all wanting.
"The shirt," he announced finally, "three crowns. Pants, four. Undergarments..." he paused, his nose wrinkling slightly, "one crown, and that's being generous. Shoes—these barely qualify—two crowns combined." He set everything down in a neat pile. "Total appraisal: ten crowns."
The naked man burst out in immediate fury, his spine straightening slightly with indignation. "Ten?! Ten crowns?! That's everything I own! How is that only worth ten crowns?! I'm naked here!"
"Your pride holds no market value," the attendant replied before folding his hands again. "If you have other assets you'd like to offer, I'm happy to appraise them. Otherwise, ten crowns is my final assessment."
The naked man stood there trembling—whether from cold, rage, or the dawning realization that he'd just stripped in public for an amount that wouldn't even cover the entry fee—before he began frantically searching his body like he might find hidden pockets in his skin.
His hands patted down his chest, his thighs, his arms, checking every surface for something, anything, that might be worth more than his collective wardrobe.
Then he paused, his gaze settling on his shaky right hand, its fingers twitching with palsy, terror, or both.
The attendant's smile widened by a careful fraction, the look of someone who'd anticipated this outcome from the start and was now enjoying the quiet satisfaction of inevitability.
"That can be exchanged as well," he said helpfully, "Quite valuable, actually, depending on how much you're willing to part with."
The man began stammering, his eyes locked on his hand as if it might suddenly sprout wings and fly away. "I can... I can sell my hand? My actual hand?"
"Of course," the attendant confirmed, then launched into what was clearly a rehearsed pricing structure delivered with the enthusiasm of a waiter reciting daily specials. "Individual fingers run ten crowns each—we can take specific digits if you have preferences, or just work from pinkie to thumb if you're indecisive. The entire hand, severed at the wrist, fetches two hundred crowns. Include the forearm up to the elbow and we're looking at five hundred. The complete arm, shoulder joint included, commands one thousand crowns."
The naked man began shouting, his voice cracking with hysteria. "Y-you're insane! You're fucking insane! You're telling me to cut off my arm for—for what, gambling money?! To play cards?!"
"I'm merely being honest," the attendant corrected. "And I didn't suggest you do anything. I simply provided information about our exchange rates. What you choose to do with that information is entirely your business."
The naked man clutched at his arm, fingers digging into flesh hard enough to leave marks, while the attendant merely stared—unmoving, unflinching, completely unwilling to offer salvation, judgment, or anything resembling human compassion.
I was utterly mortified watching it all unfold, and—gods help me—also slightly intrigued in that awful, magnetic way disasters demand your attention, even as every sensible instinct insists you look away.
I'd seen poverty in the slums, yes—had an entire group of people chase me over a single crown like starving dogs after scraps. But this was beyond extreme. This was desperation refined into its purest form, distilled until nothing remained but the raw willingness to trade anything—anything—for one more chance at changing circumstances that had clearly become unbearable.
My thoughts spiraled through implications, moral philosophy, and whether this said more about individual choice or systemic failure, before being interrupted by the naked man's voice, quieter now, defeated, carrying the hollow quality of someone who'd just made a decision they could never unmake.
"Just take it," he whispered. "The whole arm. I want the full thousand."
The attendant nodded once, crisp and businesslike, before two masked figures materialized from the gloom like they'd been waiting in the wings for their cue.
They moved with synchronized efficiency, each taking one of the naked man's arms—the left to guide him, the right to mark for removal—and escorted him behind a curtain of crimson silk that hung near the back of the lobby.
The screaming started almost immediately.
Raw, viscous agony that made everything I'd heard previously sound like rehearsal. It tore through the air with a force that bypassed the ears entirely and went straight for whatever part of the brain handled existential dread, lasting only a handful of seconds—before cutting off with abrupt finality.
The man emerged looking dazed, his face slack and trembling, skin the color of old parchment, moving with the careful steps of someone whose relationship with their body had just been permanently renegotiated.
His entire right arm was gone—just gone, the shoulder wrapped in fresh white bandages that were already showing small spots of red seeping through the fabric.
And yet.
He was smiling.
Not a happy smile, exactly. More the rictus of someone who'd just danced along the edge of a cliff, felt the stones crumble beneath their toes, and somehow stepped back onto solid ground with their life relatively intact.
The attendant placed a leather pouch on the desk—presumably containing the promised thousand crowns—and the one-armed man grabbed it with his remaining hand before stumbling toward the casino entrance with jerky movements.
"Next," the attendant called out, his voice carrying no more emotion than it had before witnessing someone trade a limb for gambling money.
And suddenly we were at the front of the line, standing before the obsidian desk, with absolutely no plan except "don't lose an arm"—a goal that felt both tragically modest and, given recent demonstrations, like perfectly respectable advice.
The attendant's gaze fixed on me, and I realized then with crystalline clarity that this evening was about to get significantly more complicated than I'd anticipated.
Which, given how complicated I'd already anticipated, was really saying something.