Cold clung to the stone walls like mold, seeping deep into Lugal's bones until his shivers racked him like seizures. The dampness didn't just touch his skin—it burrowed inside his chest, nesting there, making every breath shallow and heavy, weighed down by something far heavier than iron bars.
A nobleman's laughter still echoed in his ears—silken, lazy, and bored. That flick of a ring-heavy hand, dismissing him like a speck of dust on polished boots.
"Ballast."
Not a man. Not a person. Just weight to be discarded.
He'd bled for the Forum. Ran their errands through alleys where knives whispered louder than words. Blackmail, sabotage, silence-for-hire. Secrets traded like coin, morality peeled away like rotting skin. Every step calculated. Every betrayal justified. And yet—here he was. Forgotten. Left in the dark.
A crooked smile twitched across his cracked lips—the kind you wear when laughter would shatter your ribs.
He turned, cheek pressed against the cold stone, and listened.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
A single leak wept endlessly somewhere in the ceiling. It sounded like time bleeding away.
Beneath it, the scrape of picks against stone—slow, mechanical, hopeless. The rhythm of men too broken to rebel, too stubborn to die. He felt their exhaustion clawing at his spine.
He was one of them now.
From deeper in the Undercroft, voices rose—not the muttered groans of prisoners, but sharp, clipped syllables slicing the stale air like daggers.
"Shipment ready for the Peaks, Commander?" one asked—precise, efficient, raised to believe virtue lay in cold order.
"The northern extraction sites need more," came the reply, deep and metallic. "Aeridor quotas. They'll work them until the bones snap."
Lugal froze.
The Windswept Peaks.
A name from myth—mountains stabbing the sky like jagged teeth, where the wind never sleeps and cities float like mirages on invisible air. He'd glimpsed them once, from the highest spire of the Crowns. Strange silhouettes dancing across clouds—sky-riders, wind-fed and cruel. He'd thought them phantoms.
They were real.
And he was being sent there.
His breath hitched, shallow and fast.
The Peaks weren't a place you returned from.
They were punishment made sublime—beauty masking brutality.
They'd mine the Akar of wind from cliffside veins, and men like him would hang by ropes like dead weights, chiseling the sky.
The Crowns hadn't imprisoned him.
They were exiling him.
Discarding the tool that broke.
He sank lower, forehead pressed to wet stone, arms curled tight.
Salt touched his tongue—not from the wall, but from tears, sharp and unbidden.
Above him, the city turned without him.
Embermark—its smokestacks coughing soot into the heavens, nobles sipping firewine behind enchanted glass, children like Hatim running barefoot through alleys where dreams rotted faster than food—carried on.
Lugal had clawed from the ash-choked Sinks to glittering spires.
Now he was shoveled out like refuse.
And Hatim's voice—bright, infuriating, alive—floated through memory like smoke.
"That job might cost you."
He'd laughed once.
Now his ribs ached from it.
It had cost him everything.
Not just freedom. Not just status.
Hope.
That glimmering idea that he could be more than the bastard son of a belt-wielding drunk.
That he could outclimb his blood.
Outclimb fate.
He curled tighter, nails biting into his arms.
Fury boiled where pride once burned.
A black, simmering thing.
The Crowns had mistaken him for dead weight.
They would learn otherwise.
He memorized the guards' footsteps as they faded away.
Counted the heartbeats between each echo.
Committed the scent of mildew and despair to memory.
He would not forget.
And if the Peaks broke him, they would break a thing that screamed all the way down.