He will seek solace but will find none. He will be a slave first before a master. This is the path to be preserved. — Author unknown.
Part of him wanted to be chosen.
It was a quiet want. Faint enough that he could have missed it. But it was there, and it burned. He knew it foolish to hope for anything—and yet. Whatever the Sisters needed from their selections had to be better than what waited behind those gates.
They were part of the Church, after all.
How bad could they be?
The thought made him slow his steps. A chill moving through him that even the surrounding heat couldn't touch. Around him, orange servs drifted in lazy circles, drawn by the anxiety bleeding off him. He noticed the same color blooming around the others in the line.
He wasn't the only one afraid.
That was something, at least.
Then his legs stopped.
Not by choice. His body locked up—teeth clenched, muscles frozen, as if his legs had turned to stone beneath him. He willed himself to move. Forced it with everything he had.
It worked. Barely.
One step. Then another. Slow, measured. And then nothing again.
A chill gripped his heart.
He stared at the broken ground beneath his feet and understood something clearly: he had no real strength. Fear came for him the same as it came for anyone. He froze like the rest. There was nothing special about him.
The weight of that pressed down on his chest. He had to move—stopping in the line meant death, and he knew it, but he--just--couldn't make himself go.
He didn't get long to think about it, though.
A figure moved down the line toward him. An Excubitor. An enormous figure, he was, encased in layered black armor, black boots grinding into the stone with each heavy step, with an obsidian blade resting sheathed at his back. His helmet was a smooth silver face—reflective, featureless—erasing the man inside and replacing him with something that seemed less than human.
A guardsman of Clan Noctis. The House of Night.
"Why have you stopped?"
The voice had no real warmth in it whatsoever. Instead it echoed through the tunnel like wind through a crack in stone. Merrin swallowed. His hands rose on their own, shaking, unsure whether they were reaching for mercy or preparing to defend. No words came. Only shallow, unsteady breath.
Some part of him looked at the blade and felt a strange pull toward it.
What a thing to feel.
The Excuitor twitched.
Then his body moved before his mind caught up. His feet spread. His wrists angled. A combat stance—the kind his body had learned long ago, before all of this. Before everything. It was like a dance. Old and instinctual.
The Excubitor stopped.
Merrin realized his mistake a beat too late.
For a slave to take a fighting stance was death. He had just committed two crimes in a single moment. If anything was going to end him, it was sure to be this.
He let the stance collapse. Every muscle screaming as he pressed his knees to the scorched floor. His palms followed, the heat of the ground biting into his skin. Eyes closed. His body shook.
He did not want to die.
And yet. What a strange thing to feel when he had been walking toward it this whole time.
The Excubitor's gaze found him. He felt it before the pain did. The guard grabbed him by the hair and hauled him off the ground entirely, a surge of fire tearing through his scalp. Merrin groaned, feet dangling. The silver helmet shoved close to his face, and in its mirrored surface he saw himself—pale, skin tight over bone, dark eyes burning with something he didn't recognize.
A defiant expression.
Is that my face?
He didn't recognize it. There was a gap between that face and what he knew to be inside him. He had wanted death. Had chosen it, had been walking toward it. But that face refused. It rejected the idea entirely.
That's not true.
In the span of a breath, he let it go. He smoothed his expression into something defeated and empty. The fight drained out of it like water from a cracked bottle.
The Excubitor seemed satisfied, and he threw Merrin aside.
Merrin hit the base of the wall hard. A lamp shattered behind him. Current jolted through his body—brief and wild—and he lurched away from it with a gasp, hands catching the floor, heat biting into his palms. He pulled back, knelt there, gritting through it.
More pain to cancel out pain. How stupid.
A few people in the line watched. Their expressions ranging from confusion, mockery, to something close to awe. The Excubitor wore none of those. He carried only pride in the set of his shoulders, the unhurried pace of his steps. Satisfaction dressed up and walked around.
"Stand."
The word landed like something thrown. Merrin obeyed. Against every instinct still alive in him, he stood—hands at his sides, back still stinging from the lamp. He rejoined the line and said nothing.
A slave. In every sense of the word now.
He hated how easily it fit.
The gates loomed before him soon enough. Enormous. Like mountains forced into the earth. Their surfaces rippling slowly in uneven waves—eltium, restless. He looked past them into the darkness beyond. It seemed to breathe. A metallic warmth pushed out from it and brushed across his face like a gust.
The Gresendent Sisters stood watching the line. Merrin watched them watching.
Would they choose him?
He noticed the envy rising in him when his eyes found the slaves already gathered behind the veiled women—the chosen ones, standing still and quiet. Whatever awaited them had to be better than the mines.
They had it. He didn't.
Without fully meaning to, he slowed his steps again. As if moving slowly might earn a glance. A look. Some signal that he had been seen.
The Sisters spared him nothing. Not one glance. He might as well have been air.
Merrin frowned. Then sighed, dropping his eyes.
What did I expect?
He was a sinner; he knew this. They were servants of God. Of course, they could see the stain on him. Of course, they wouldn't choose someone God had already turned away. The wanting didn't change anything. Hope never did.
He hated that about it.
Cold moved through him. Not the cold of froststones. Something deeper. He looked into the dark beyond the gate and felt the air leave his lungs. This was an end. Behind those gates waited pain, and terror, and whatever came after that. His people had cast him out. The ash and the mountains had let him go. And now the Almighty had turned his face away.
What was left?
A black serv drifted past him—dark and slow. He stared at it.
This is despair.
Mist th—
Something slammed into his back.
The force sent him stumbling forward into the pulsing dark. A guard, impatient with his hesitation—a cane to the back, apparently, was the answer to slowing down. Merrin almost found it funny. He watched the blackness rush toward his face, thoughts scattering.
What's in there? What's beyond it? What's going to happen?
Then light flooded across his eyes.
A vast cave opened before him. Enormous. The ceiling jutted downward in jagged spikes—stone fangs hanging far overhead. Chains drooped between them, clanging softly in the stale air. Below, the ground was rough and scarred, deep craters spiraling across it in unnatural patterns, dark and seemingly bottomless.
Casted, Merrin thought, and immediately felt sick at how easily that word came.
Almighty power. Used to dig pits.
Around those pits, slaves clustered together like something less than men. Hollow-faced. Iron chains fastened at their waists, lowering them down into the dark. Excubitors stood at the edges in black, silent. They didn't need to speak. Power was enough.
Structures were carved into the sloping walls—platforms cut from stone, perched high on the rock face. The air tasted of iron and eltium, thick and metallic, settling at the back of his throat like rust.
It itched.
But he breathed it in anyway. There was no other air to breathe.