the impostor, part five

by nick nelson

part five of five

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i woke in darkness to the sounds of boots in the narrow corridor outside the little room I had been placed in. i heard shouts, and doors being broken open. then the door to the little room was burst open, before my eyes could begin to accustom to the darkness… dr eusebius’s bookstore was being raided by some branch or other of the imperial army or police, i never did find out which. i was taken to a dungeon, and then an interrogation room somewhere in the great city, whose layout and streets were of course a complete mystery to me.. so that i was in the last degree of “not knowing where i was.” i never saw any of my companions again. i always assumed they were taken to the same facility as myself, but i never had any way to really confirm this. for all i ever knew they were all killed in the raid. but whether they were alive or dead, a tired looking imperial functionary in a particularly unsightly red and gray uniform urged me, in a manner indicating he had little time to waste on me, to denounce them, and the venerable dr eusebius, for various crimes and heresies whose exact nature i had neither the wit nor inclination to decode. faced with the implacable reality of the imperial torture apparatus, i immediately acquiesced to the tired looking officer’s demands, and signed, without making a pretense of reading them, a series of confessions and denunciations he placed before me. i was then taken away, certain, i thought, to be placed against a wall and shot. but instead, after watching the sun come up over the wall of the jail’s large courtyard, i was trucked with twenty or so other miscreants to a prison on the edge of the desert, where i spent the next fifteen years fastening epaulets to the uniforms of the imperial armies and navies. you can guess the rest. when the empire fell, the prisons were opened, and all such anonymous wretches as myself released, to find our way to the burned and looted capital. such is my tale. in some ways it may seem an outlandish one, but is it not, on reflection, the story of all men? i loved, and was not loved. i was betrayed, and betrayed others. i spent long decades doing repetitious drudge work, interspersed with a few moments of unspeakable horror. i was a cuckold, a murderer, and a coward. i say no more. i hope that this brief account satisfies the requirements of the application.