The unforgiving iron manacles chaffed his wrists, and the sound the chains made when he moved mocked him. Abdel growled, a low, animal noise deep in his throat, and clenched his fists.

He blinked his eyes open and saw a man enter the cell. He was short and fat, with a stinking abundance of body hair thick with sweat around the black leather straps of his simple girdle and harness. There were tools hanging from the straps, most of which Abdel didn't recognize. The strange man met Abdel's gaze and smiled, revealing a single tooth hanging yellow and jagged from his upper gum. The man's beard was uneven, broken by a rough burn scar that did nothing to add attractiveness or even character to his round face.

"You are awake," the man said slowly, careful to pronounce each word as if language was new to him, or at the very least difficult.

"Jailer. ." Abdel started to say, then his parched throat closed on him, and his eyes watered. He sucked in a breath and started choking from the smoke from the brazier, dehydration, and the ache from a bruise he didn't remember getting.

"Dungeon master," the man murmured, looking away from Abdel, then pausing as if seeing the brazier for the first time. As he reached up to grab a poker hanging from a hook on the wall to Abdel's right, he said, "Dungeon master, not jailer. This is not a jail, it is a dungeon."

Abdel sighed, trying to meet the man's blank, glazed stare, but to no avail. The man was an idiot.

"What—" Abdel croaked as the man set the poker into the burning coals and held it there. "What is your name, Dungeon Master?"

The man smiled but didn't look at Abdel. "Booter," he said, "is my name. My name is Booter."

"Where am I?" Abdel asked, his voice beginning to really come back now. "How did I get here?"