Sparks danced in the air as pickaxes struck stone, splinters shooting outward with each blow. A lantern hung from every miner's belt, casting uneven light across the tunnel walls.
A Luminaire with dust-filled brown hair walked with his hands folded behind his back, his eyes moving across the flickering lights.
"Such pitiful souls."
He sighed quietly to himself.
"Arthur!"
The man turned at his name.
"What now, Isaac?" He hissed.
A miner approached, fiddling with his lantern. Thin scratches covered his face, thin streams of blood pooling at the sharper features beneath the grime. The man would have been quite beautiful if not for the dirt hiding most of what he had to offer.
"We've hit another peak of bedrock."
"So dig around it?"
Isaac finally let go of his lantern.
"Our experts think this one stretches close to a kilometre in either direction. They're advising we change course entirely."
Arthur had to stop himself from pulling his hair out.
He was approaching his fortieth anniversary as lead Luminaire of the first depth. He hadn't minded the first twenty years. The pay was extraordinary, and the power he had accumulated down here was its own reward. But lately his thinking had begun to shift. He was starting to feel like life was happening somewhere above him and he was missing all of it. What good was money when there was nothing to spend it on down here? He had always wanted a family, and time wasn't as generous as it had once seemed. He had considered pouring his savings into life-extending consumable motes, but finding those would require three lifetimes of searching in the first place.
"Change direction then."
They were after precious metals, not tunnels, so the change in course wasn't the problem itself. The problem was logistics. With generations of miners having worked this depth, every new deviation made the maps look less like maps and more like a perplexing maze.
Without another word Arthur walked away, already lost in his own thoughts.
Isaac walked to a crate of glistening ores and set his lantern down. He pressed a small lever, raised the globe, struck a match and relit it. He shook the matchstick out with a sigh, then picked up his pickaxe and started toward the others. His hands ached beyond reason, the base of each finger wrapped in dirty bandages holding the torn skin together.
"What did he say?"
An old man asked. Seven fingers left between both hands.
"Change direction."
The old man cursed.
They would dig wherever they were told. But there was something about working in a straight line that made it easier to track your progress, and in its own quiet way served as motivation. A turn felt like starting over.
"Everyone! We're moving to A98 from here. Grab your things. Ten minutes." The old man roared.
Displeased voices erupted around them. Isaac scoffed. It felt like he had caused this somehow.
A hand squeezed his shoulder and brought him back.
"Don't take it to heart, kid. They know you didn't cause this. Heimith just wasn't smiling on us today, that's all."
Isaac nodded at the reassurance and made his way to A98 himself.
Five hours of hard labour passed before he tossed the last rock onto a mine cart. He wiped his face, which only smudged the dust and sweat together into something worse. Then he grabbed the handle and started pushing. Heavy, as always, but it moved.
He parked it at the end of a line of carts and walked away toward a seemingly random tunnel.
His father had worked these mines. His father's father before him, and his father's father before that. The people down here were among the few survivors of the Smolten's rise, blessed by the ancient Royal Noble families, or so his father had always told him. The work took a toll on the body, that much he knew. But compared to the surface, this was something close to heaven. He had food. He had a wife.
History was interesting in its own way. It was also depressing, knowing there had once been a world where humans stood at the top of it.
Houses surrounded him now, built from thin metal sheets that would have come apart in any real wind. Windows replaced by whatever cloth was available, it didn't matter what kind. The houses pressed so close together that if they had been wood a single fire stove could have taken the whole row.
Isaac turned a corner, pushed a blanket aside, and stepped inside.
"I'm home."
A woman, impossibly beautiful compared to her surroundings with raven black hair, stepped around the corner with a grin.
"Come." She took his hand and pulled him into the bedroom.
She sat down and pulled a chair in front of her.
"Sit."
"I can stand just fine."
"Sit."
He obeyed without further protest.
"What's gotten into you, Emlyn?"
She took his hand and placed it against her abdomen. A mischievous glint in her eyes.
Her skin was warm and soft against his roughened palm.
"What are you doing?" He asked, smiling uncertainly.
"I'm pregnant, Isaac."
Her voice at that moment was something he had no word for. If a perfect world had ever made a sound, it would have been that.
Isaac pulled his hand back as though he had burned it.
"Wha— Are you sure?"
"I'm certain."
Tears filled her eyes. Happy ones.
Isaac couldn't find a single word, but he pulled her close.
"Thank god. Thank you."
The two fell asleep holding each other tightly.
But before the next day arrived he nudged Emlyn awake.
"Come. Let's go to the Sky Sliver. I have a good feeling about it."
"But you have work tomorrow."
"It doesn't matter."
The streets were empty at this hour. Everyone down here lived something close to a slave's life without fully knowing it, working hard every day without question. But sometimes, even with everything happening on the surface, some of them would walk out to a gaping hole in the ceiling of their world, and dream about it. The Sky Sliver, they called it. They were never permitted to attempt the climb, but they believed that one day, when the god Heimith had helped humanity rise to the top again, stars would appear there as a signal. Their signal.
Perhaps there was something in the air tonight. More than twenty men and women stood here, all gazing upward into the darkness.
Isaac turned to Emlyn and wrapped his hands around hers.
"Let's stay a while. I'll be fine tomorrow. That's a promise."
She squeezed his hand and turned her gaze upward. Isaac did the same.
"Mmm?"
Emlyn hummed softly.
A dull sound came from above, like the gaping hole had finally found a heartbeat. All conversation stopped. Every face turned upward.
"What is that?"
Isaac narrowed his eyes.
He glanced sideways at Emlyn. Her profile was just as sharp as her personality. Were they really about to witness something no other generation had ever been given the chance to see?
"Look." She pointed, smiling, her teeth perfect and white.
Isaac followed her finger.
There, in the darkness, far enough away that distance lost all meaning, a twinkle.
His lips parted.
"It's actually—" He whispered. "It's finally happening."
He turned toward Emlyn, arms already moving to pull her close.
Then it didn't matter.
Her hand tore from his. Something black came down on her small frame without warning or sound.
A splatter. Countless crunches.
She collapsed under the weight, her spine folding in ways it was never built to fold, then something else somewhere shattered. When she finally hit the ground the momentum of whatever had fallen kept going, driving through her, fracturing everything that remained.
Flesh and bone erupted outward. Screams followed. People scattered.
Isaac didn't move. He stood and stared at what had been his wife a moment ago.
Squelch.
Then the twinkling star descended in the shape of a blade. It drove straight through what remained and into the ground.
The mass that had fallen looked like nothing human. Endless threads moving through what appeared to be chaos, tangled and twisted and folding over themselves, a knot with no clear beginning or end.
Isaac grabbed his hair and pulled.
He couldn't understand. He didn't understand. He didn't want to understand. One moment she had been here. The next she wasn't. He looked around at the faces of the people nearby. Did anyone else understand? Could anyone tell him what had just happened?
And then, just as his grief was about to break open into something, hatred or confusion or anger or all of them at once, something changed.
As though an invisible force had reached in and replaced his mind with someone else's, his face went still. His eyes settled on what remained of his wife with the same expression he might have given an object left in the road. Not the love of his life. Just something that was there.
He opened and closed his fist a few times.
"I should probably tell Arthur."
Just as Isaac left, the people around him turned their gazes upward again, as though the gore at their feet had already ceased to matter. Chatter returned. Giggles even. It was exactly as it had been before anything had happened.