The one legged man sat alone in a cave. No, that’s not right. The one legged man died alone in a cave. Yeah. That’s better. The one legged man woke up and then died. How awful. But what a fitting end to this story. Because that’s exactly what happened. I died.

In case you’re wondering. It was a long and horrible death. My leg eventually healed, and I think that’s the only reason that they kept me around for as long as they did. It was soon after that they started eating me bit by bit. I don’t think that I was a great tasting meat, but they seemed to enjoy causing me pain. With no food, I had little energy to fight them, and they took off the bottom half of my right leg first and made some sort of soup with the foot. Well… Not so much a soup, as a jelly.

They would cauterize the cut each time to make sure I didn’t bleed out. With the top part of that leg, a week later, they had a bit more trouble. They ended up pulling my leg out of my hip and sort of working their way around the wound with a hot knife. I can only remember the fire and the pain.

With the first leg gone, they did a little less to keep me prisoner, and when they took my other leg, they didn’t guard me at all. They allowed me to eat from the common area, and I might have eaten some of my own flesh, but hunger did weird things to me. When my arms were gone, they did not feed me at all.

The final day came when they stood over me and crushed my throat. Then the world turned black and I was dead.