Lochlan felt trapped, and as circumstance would have it, he was actually trapped, deep in the belly of the queen's mancatcher plant. This was, however, a fairly common occurence. Like its master, the mancatcher had a mysterious illness, and tending to the vile thing was among Lochlan's many horticultural duties.

Spending so much time around the large and slippery predatory plant led to accidents, and once again Lochlan found himself the victim of the mancatcher. Fortunately for him, the corrosive secretions that would normally make short work of reducing victims to a pile of bones were suppressed by antacids. These were regularly administered by Lochlan to combat an acid imbalance that would often cause the mancatcher discomfort and was one of the many symptoms it had exhibited since it fell ill.

Lochlan suspected a great deal of it had to do with the envionment - mancatchers liked swampland, not the clay rich soil of the palace grounds, but then, that was how the queen liked things to be, and he could say no different.

He sat in his usual corner of the cavity and waited for the tonsil to appear above him. The feeding cycle of the mancatcher was such that after twenty minutes of digestion it would reset itself for the next catch. A live victim could injure the particularly sensitive organs of the mancatcher, and so the tonsil in particular is retracted during gestation. The best way to exit, Lochlan found, was by tugging on the tonsil of the plant once it revealed itself. This would cause a violent reaction and it would forcibly vomit whatever was held inside. So he sat and waited, looking up at the top of his crimson tinted womb for the bulb to show itself.

"How did I get here!?" he yelled. Lochlan was not talking about the mancatcher. An outside observer might have heard a muffled moaning sound, but thought little of it, and would once again find himself distracted by the eerie beauty of the mancatcher's blossom, if it were not the case that the blossom had wilted early, a symptom of the plant refusing to absorb magnesium.

The trapped feeling was persistent and permeated all things, and the plant was merely one in a line of many physical manifestations of it. The high palace walls, his empty relationship with Ester, his incredibly tedious friendships with palace staff. It all stifled him like a candle in a cupboard.

When did it get like this? He knew when of course, he knew all too well. He could not remember exactly when her name changed, from a prayer to a curse, but change it did, and once again, he cursed it. Gods damn you, Fion Rankin.

(( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr09ncY2u4A ))