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"To be discarded is to be given: the clarity of seeing the world's teeth. Remember the bite—then learn to bite back."
—Keepers of Memories, Canticle of the Unbroken
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Cold wasn't just in the air. It was in the stone. It seeped through the damp, weeping walls, burrowing into Lugal's bones until his shivers weren't tremors but seizures, violent and uncontrollable. The damp didn't cling; it colonized. It filled his lungs like wet ash, making each breath a labor against a weight heavier than the rusted iron bars. His ribs, old bruises singing anew, protested every gasp.
He heard it still. The nobleman's laugh. Vayne's laugh. Silken. Lazy. Utterly, casually bored. That dismissive flick of a ring-heavy hand. Not sentencing a man. Disposing of refuse.
"Ballast."
Not a name. Not a life. Just inert weight. Disposable mass.
He'd bled for the Sunken Forum. Run their poisoned errands through knife-alley shadows. Traded whispers sharp enough to slit throats. Sabotaged rivals with whispers and rigged gears. Bought silence with coin or colder threats. Secrets were his currency, morality a luxury shed like dead skin. Every step calculated. Every betrayal justified by the promise whispered in the dark: Rise. Matter. Make them choke.
And yet.
Here.
Forgotten. Left in the dripping dark. A tool discarded the moment its edge chipped.
A crooked smile twisted his cracked lips—a rictus grin where laughter would have shattered him.
He turned his face, pressing his cheek hard against the icy stone. Listened.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
A single leak wept from the unseen ceiling. Like time bleeding out onto the unforgiving floor.
Beneath it, a deeper rhythm: the scrape of picks against distant rock. Slow. Relentless. Hopeless. The sound of men already broken, too stubborn to die but too hollow to rebel. He felt their exhaustion, a phantom ache gnawing at his own spine. He was one of them now. Ballast. Grinding itself to dust.
Then—voices. Cutting through the groans and scrapes from deeper within the Undercroft. Sharp. Clipped. Carrying the sterile confidence of command.
"Shipment ready for the Peaks, Commander?" Precise. Efficient. Virtue found in cold order.
"The northern extraction sites need more." The reply was deeper, metallic, devoid of anything resembling care. "Aeridor quotas. They'll work them until the bones snap. Or the ropes fray."
Lugal froze. Ice flooded his veins, colder than the stone.
The Windswept Peaks.
A name from fireside whispers and smuggler's boasts. Mountains that stabbed the bruised sky like broken gods' teeth, where the wind screamed eternally and cities of the Sky-Riders clung to impossible cliffs, floating mirages fed on storm and arrogance. He'd glimpsed their silhouettes once, years ago, from the highest Crowns spire he'd dared infiltrate—distant, jagged shapes dancing on clouds. Phantoms. Legends.
Real.
And he was being sent there.
His breath hitched, shallow and ragged, catching on the damp rot in his chest. The Peaks weren't just a mine. They were exile perfected. Punishment disguised as sublimity. Beauty masking brutality. They mined Sky-Akar there, they said. Veins of solidified wind lacing the sheer cliffs. Men—ballast—would dangle by fraying ropes over abysses that drank the light, chiseling at the sky itself until the wind tore them free or their hearts gave out. No one returned from the Peaks. They vanished. Erased. The ultimate discard.
The Crowns hadn't just imprisoned him.
They were erasing him.
He sank lower, forehead grinding against the wet, filthy stone. Arms wrapped tight around himself, mirroring the boy under the table. Salt stung his lips—sharp, hot tears tracking through the grime. Unbidden. Unwelcome. A weakness he couldn't afford, yet couldn't choke back.
Far above, the city ground on. Embermark's heart still beat: smokestacks belching soot into the perpetual twilight, nobles sipping firewine behind glimmering wards, children—like the storm-eyed boy who'd once shoved a merchant—still running, still stealing, still dreaming dreams that curdled faster than Middens meat. Life continued, oblivious.
He'd clawed his way from the Sinks gutter to the Crowns' threshold.
Now he was being shoveled out. Refuse for the sky-pits.
And Hatim's voice, bright with stupid, stubborn life, echoed in the hollow of his skull, clearer than the dripping water:
"That kind of job... it burns more than it pays."
Lugal had smirked then. Offered bitter bread and a harder path.Now the phantom laughter tore at his ruined ribs. A jagged, internal wound.
It had cost him everything.
Not just freedom. Not just the phantom status promised by the Forum.
Hope.
That fragile, burning coal he'd nurtured since the cold hearthstone. The desperate belief that he could be more than the bastard son of a belt-wielding drunk.
That he could outclimb the stink of the hovel, the weight of nothing, the chains of his own blood. That he could force the world to see him, to fear him, to acknowledge he existed.
He curled tighter, nails digging into his own arms, drawing beads of blood that mingled with the stone's damp. Where pride had burned, now fury boiled. A black, viscous thing, thick as tar, simmering in the pit of his despair. It didn't warm him. It consumed.
The Crowns. Vayne. The Forum. They thought him dead weight. Broken. Ready for the scrap heap of the sky.
Mistake.
He stilled his shivering. Forced his breathing shallow, silent. He listened, truly listened, past the drip and the distant picks.
Footsteps. Guards. Circling. Fading.
He memorized their rhythm. The cadence of indifference.
Counted the heartbeats between echoes.
Committed the stench of this place—mildew, despair, the metallic tang of old fear—to the core of his being. He would wear it like armor. Remember it like a vow.
He would not forget.
And if the Windswept Peaks broke him?
If the screaming wind tore him from the rope?
Then they would break a thing that remembered.
A thing that knew it was more than ballast.
A thing that would scream all the way down.