"I lost a friend that day… the darkness had swallowed him." —Transcribed from a lowly miner, kept in the archives of the Gresendent Sisters.
The chasm floor was dotted with pools of white light—square lamps carried by slaves moving like ghosts toward the deeper sections of the pit. Whatever quiet had existed before was long gone. Now there was only the relentless, rhythmic hammering of metal against stone. Thousands of groans that merged into a single low vibration and rattled the teeth. No one spoke. They were miners doing one thing only.
Time lost its shape.
Merrin realized at some point that he had stopped being aware of anything beyond the reach of his pickaxe. There was only him and the stone. One that, with each strike, he hoped for something—anything. Oredite, Eltium, even a small scrap of iron that might earn him a moment's relief.
He found only dust.
This is impossible, he thought.
"Ahh!"
The cry shattered his focus. He turned toward the sound.
Across the chasm, on the left wall, a man hung from his chains—the leather straps that had been fastened around his waist had snapped clean through. He dangled by his arms alone, like a rag that a breeze could carry away. Black servs—the color of despair—had already begun swarming around him, drawn by what they sensed.
He was going to die.
Even from a distance, aided by the buzzing lamps along the wall, Merrin could see it clearly. The man's chains were rusted brown. They would snap at any moment—Merrin knew the sound now, knew what it looked like right before. He glanced at the other slaves nearby and saw the same thing on all of them: rusted links, corroded, waiting to fail.
All except his.
Was I just lucky?
Someone should help him. The thought came and went. The chasm was too wide. There was no way to reach the man, and even if someone tried, the added weight would snap their own rusted chains. It would kill both of them. The only ones with the strength or means to help were the Excubitors or a Caster.
They wouldn't come.
The man's next scream silenced the hammering throughout the cave. Merrin felt it land in his chest. Most of the other slaves glanced over for a moment, then turned back to their work, hiding behind the rhythm of their pickaxes. Anything to avoid looking at a preview of their own end.
My end too, Merrin thought.
He lowered his eyes.
Another death. What does it even matter? Maybe it's better. He'll reach the Almighty before me.
That was surely better.
The man kept struggling, his arms dripping blood into the darkness below.
"Help!" he screamed. No one answered.
Merrin looked at his own chains. Pristine. Strong. Black as the sky over Eastos. (The world)
If I hadn't taken these, would he have survived? Did I take the only good chain in the pile?
The guilt came fast.
Is it because of me that he's dying?
He had started to look away when a sharp snap echoed through the cave. A short scream followed, then a muffled thud from far below.
Merrin went still. He would not look down. He would not see the body.
He did something I couldn't, he thought. A cold tear ran down his cheek, mixing with the grime on his face.
Coward.
He raised his pickaxe and struck the wall. The marks from his hours of work were rough and uneven, like ugly scars in the stone. This was his life now—an endless stretch of rust, iron, and dust.
Eventually...
By the end of his shift, he sat on a highstone (Raised stone) and stared out across the vast cave—the spiral pits, the empty faces. He could feel his own eyes beginning to look like theirs. It was only a matter of time.
He was a coward sitting in the dark, surviving on leftover scraps he found in the corners of the mine. Each day he ate, and each day he hoped, quietly and without admitting it, to die.
Death never came.
Merrin groaned and began the long climb back up the chains toward the rim. Six slaves had died today attempting the same climb on faulty, rusted iron. And here he was, making it safely on his black links.
Why don't I just let go?
He looked down at the silhouettes of the miners below, the long shadows stretching out from the lamps. The drop was immense. The air up here was bitterly cold.
Coward.
The word came again, the same as always. He was the coward who always ended up with the best chains while better men fell. It felt less like luck and more like a curse—his life fed by the deaths of others.
He kept climbing.
When he reached the rim, he stretched his hands out over the scorching floor and hauled himself up, panting. His sleeves were filthy, and the smell coming off him was nothing like the clean scent of ash from home. It just smelled bad.
His legs buckled when he stood, slamming against the floor. He didn't know how long he had been down there. Two days? Three? He couldn't tell anymore. Maybe only fear was keeping him going.
"Stop shaking," he whispered to his hands.
He wanted peace. But the voice at the back of his mind told him the truth—he wanted the peace that came after death, but he was too afraid to die to ever reach it.
I deserve nothing. I can't protect anything. I only take.
He looked at the chains still fastened around his waist. He had taken the good chain, and somewhere below, a man had paid for that with his life. The chain felt like a tether now—one that snuffed out others to keep his own flame lit.
He knelt on the floor in silence.
Then noticed a line forming nearby.
He wiped the dried tears from his face and shuffled toward it. This was new. Each person who reached the front came away with wet lips.
Water.
The realization hit him at the same moment as the thirst—sudden and complete, like his body had only just remembered. For days he had been licking the sweat from his own skin. The thought turned his stomach.
He joined the line. The smell of unwashed bodies thick enough to taste.
He looked around and noticed something else.
No servs were present.
They removed the servs?
The servs were the eyes of the Almighty. How could they simply be gone? Then a different thought arrived—the servs were like people in a way. They grew bored. Perhaps the sheer unrelenting bleakness of the mines had finally driven them elsewhere, to find suffering that was at least interesting to witness.
Over on a cluster of raised stones nearby, a group of scrapers sat together, complaining about their lives in low voices. Dim yellow servs hovered above them.
Yellow.
Were they happy?
He couldn't understand what there was to be happy about in this pit. Some small warmth in shared misery, maybe. But Merrin kept his distance. Isolation was the only way to keep his curse from spreading to them.
His turn at the front came soon enough. A large barrel sat atop a three-legged wooden chair, froststones embedded around the wood to keep the water cool. He took a cup from the table and dipped it in.
The water felt warm against his fingers—the froststones barely doing their job. He brought it to his lips and breathed in.
The smell hit him first. Rotten eggs. Sulfur and decay.
Just what I deserve, he thought, and drank the cup dry.