The mines of Dar-Khazul were not built by men, but by beasts long buried in myth — scaled titans whose bones still bristled from the walls like jagged fangs. The mountain above was a corpse. Its veins ran black with ore and sorrow. And deep within, among the suffocating dark, the choking dust, and the endless echo of picks against stone, a boy labored. Barefoot. Shackled. Forgotten.
They called him Vael — not in kindness, but mockery. A cursed name, a dead god's name, spat from the mouths of cruel men. The overseers, fat and drunk on fermented bile, enjoyed inventing stories about how he came to be there. "Spawn of a slave whore," some said. "Bastard of a shadow demon," said others. No one knew the truth. Not even Vael. His earliest memories were of cold — bone-deep cold — and screams echoing through tunnels that never ended.
He learned early that weakness invited pain. When you cried, they laughed. When you begged, they kicked. And when you fought back, they made examples of you. Vael learned to endure. Not just to survive, but to remember. Every scar, every lash, every insult, he carved them into his mind like sacred runes. Where other children broke or died, he grew. Hard. Silent. Watching. Waiting.
He studied everything: the way the guards walked, the cracks in the walls, the way voices echoed off stone. He counted the minutes between shifts. He learned where they kept the keys, where the rats burrowed, and which of the other slaves might be coaxed into loyalty — or betrayal.
By the age of ten, Vael was strong for his size. Thin, but all muscle and wiry sinew. His eyes, once a dull brown, now held a strange glint — not of madness, but of focus. The kind that made grown men uneasy when he stared too long.
The breaking point came when an overseer — a bloated, lecherous brute named Skarn — took pleasure in tormenting a sick girl barely older than Vael. He beat her until her ribs cracked. She screamed until her voice broke into wet gurgles.
That night, Vael did not sleep. He sat in the shadows, sharpening a shard of obsidian stolen from the wall. When the torches dimmed and the night shift fell into its drunken lull, Vael struck.
Skarn died gurgling on his own tongue, the obsidian buried deep in his throat. His eyes widened in disbelief — not at the pain, but at the fact that someone dared to defy him.
Vael didn't stop there. He took the man's rusted keys, his iron cudgel, and his cloak. He freed the girl, along with five others, and vanished into the labyrinth of tunnels. Only two made it out alive.
The surface world blinded him at first. The sun, golden and hateful, seared his skin. The sky stretched so wide it made him dizzy. But Vael did not turn back. He wandered!