The first thing that reached him was the sound. Not a single chain, but a whole choir of them—iron links rasping stone, metal settling, cuffs knocking bone. The rhythm didn't match any clock he knew. It was the sort of sound that wore at you the way water wears at rock: quietly, relentlessly, until something gives.
Cold followed. It wasn't winter-cold like the alley; this was cellar cold, stale and damp, the kind that collected in your lungs and decided to stay. His back pressed to stone. His wrists hurt. When he tried to move, iron bit into raw skin and made his fingers tingle in ugly waves.
He opened his eyes.
Dim orange light bled along the length of a long chamber—torches set too far apart, flickering, halos trembling in currents he couldn't feel. The ceiling was low enough that the heat from the flames blackened it into a smeared, tar-black mirror. The air stank of sweat, old smoke, leather, and the metallic scent of blood that had been cleaned poorly and often. The floor was solid as stone, topped with a faint layer of dust.
People lined the walls in two ragged rows, left and right, with a narrow corridor between. Chains linked ankles to rings towards the floor and wrists to thicker anchors at shoulder height. There were a lot of them. A few looked human the way he did; most didn't quite. Not enough to be grotesque—just a stack of little wrongs, each one small until you added them up: a set of tusks that had been filed blunt and still looked like violence; a line of scales along a woman's cheekbone that cought firelight like fish-skin; fingers that were too long; ears that come to points and twitched at every chatter; eyes slit like a cat's and too gold to be natural. They wore what people in places like this always wore: what they'd been taken in, plus shackles.
Somewhere down the line someone coughed until the cough turned into a choke and then quieted with the practiced speed of a hand clapping over a mouth.
Nyx became aware of the weight on his own wrists again and looked. The cuffs were thick, black pitted from age. They sat a touch too large on his bones; when he flexed, he could feel skin slide and bite. His ankles were better—if better meant tighter. A chain ran between them and rattled when he moved his feet. He tried anyway, testing the give... There was none.
He breathed out. The breath looked like nothing. The air here ate mist.
"You look like shit,"
said a voice to his left.
He turned his head carefully. The girl chained beside him had cropped, uneven hair and a face made for stubbornness—cheekbones a little too sharp for comfort, eyes that flicked like knives. She couldn't have been more than a year older than him, if that. Her shirt had once been white; now it was the color of whatever passes for teeth in the slums. Her wrists were worn and scabbed, but steady.
"Thanks,"
he rasped.
"I worked for it."
A low chuckle drifted from across the corridor. Opposite him, a man sat cross-legged, the chain on his ankles doing nothing to dull the lazy sharpness in his posture—back to the wall like a cat that knew better than to offer its spine to a room. He had a mouth made for smiling at the wrong time and eyes that didn't bother to match it.
"Everyone's ugly in the pens, some of us just wear it better"
Nyx let his head rest back at the stone again. The wall leached heat like it was a hobby.
"Where is 'the pens'?"
That brought him a heartbeat of silence.
The girl's brows creased.
"The holding pens,"
she said, slower, like she wasn't sure if he was mocking her.
"Under the exchange. Where they keep stock before the calling."
"Calling?" Nyx repeated, because apparently his mouth liked asking questions even when his brain told it to save breath.
"Auctions,"
the man murmured, pitching his voice soft to avoid the nearest guard like a practiced whisperer.
"You get weighed, priced, and paraded. Then someone richer than you are decides what the rest of your life looks like."
"Comforting."
Nyx's tone was flat.
"I was worried I'd be forced to make choices."
The man's grin widened
"Don't worry. They'll take that from you too."
The girl gave the man a look that said, he wouldn't even make her top ten problems. Then she looked back at Nyx.
"How long've you been in?"
Nyx rolled the thought around. By the fifth shiver back in the city, time had given up on him—and he on it.
"Long enough to hate the chain. Not long enough to get used to the smell."
"That's optimistic."
The man sounded amused.
Nyx's wrists throbbed. He lifted them a fraction and set them down again when the chain scolded him. He took inventory of himself the way you when the world requires it: hunger clung to him like a debt collector that knew where he slept; ribs mapped in bruises; a cut lashed along his left side, sticky under the shirt; hands still steady enough to do harm if harm needed doing. The black veins under his skin were gone — what a shame, he thought. Now he was just regular ugly with nothing to distract from it. They'd been such excellent conversation-stoppers.
"What's your name?"
The girl asked.
He hesitated for the smallest part of a breath. The floor of his life had shifted too many times in the last year for names to feel solid. He chose the only thing he had.
"Nyx."
She nodded, and he could have sworn there was the ghost of a smile on her lips—or maybe he was just seeing things. Given his hunger and the shape he was in, his mind was bound to start decorating reality.
"Serra."
Across the corridor came the man's voice.
"Calren." He dipped his head slightly—more a smirk than a bow, the kind of gesture you didn't risk in a place where bows just made your neck easier to cut.
"Serra. Calren."
Nyx tested the syllables as if names had weight. Sometimes they did.
A flicker of light slid along the edge of his vision. Not torchlight. Not anything the room could own. He didn't move his head—didn't have to. The words wrote themselves along the inside of thought like frost writing on glass.
[Your trial of origin begins. Good luck!]
They burned cold for an instant, then vanished. No fanfare. No instruction. As if the world had cleared its throat to say,
"Yes we're doing this,"
And then closed its mouth
He licked his lips that had forgotten what water felt or tasted like.
"What happens if you… I don't know. Don't sell?"
Calren's grin didn't falter.
"Everyone sells. Some fetch coin. Some fetch favor. Some fetch a laugh. 'Unsold' just means they haven't finished counting how much you're worth."
"Don't listen to him like he's gospel,"
Serra muttered.
"He makes everything sound like a joke."
"Thats because everything is,"
Calren countered,
"And I refuse to let reality win."
A clatter of boots approached—heavy, unhurried, the sound of people who didn't need to run because running was for the chased. Metal chimed against metal. Voices carried in a language Nyx didn't know he knew until he found himself understanding it. The words were simple: tally, shift, rotate, keep the youth for the last.
The guards came into view in the next breath. Three of them were clad in boiled leather over mail, their helmets plated so only their eyes showed. One woman in a coat that fit with the easy perfection of wealth and status—dark, high-collared, trimmed in something that didn't come cheap even in halls where gold was common as dust. Two handlers, rope in hand, hauling a creature that could have been a dog if dogs were built for war and disappointment. It had too many teeth and not enough patience. A set of sigils had been burned into the hide along its shoulder; the scars gleamed glossy where fur refused to grow back.
They moved with the practiced ease of people for whom dragging bodies was more routine than eating. A guard stopped at every third chain, checked the shackle, checked the face, checked the tag pinned through a strip of cloth at the collar. Any prisoner who looked like trouble found the creature's teeth suddenly a handspan from their legs as a warning. No one kicked. No one screamed. Not because they were brave, Nyx thought, but because courage here was a currency long since spent, and no one had bothered getting new.
Nyx kept his face as empty as he could make it. He knew how to fade into the backdrop when the backdrop was safer than the stage.
Calren's grin thinned a shade
"Congratulations,"
He murmured across the corridor without moving his lips.
"You're special."
"Always wanted to be. Just not here"
Serra's shoulder brushed his. It wasn't a comfort—just someone else's chain shifting in this limited space where even breathing took negotiations.
"They call last lots 'final gold,'"
she told him.
"Means they think someone from the front wants to show teeth."
"Front?"
"The pit's split,"
Calren explained.
"Back benches for coin. Front for names. If you've got a name, you don't do benches. You stand where people can see you ruin a room with a finger."
Nyx's mouth twitched.
"Sounds friendly."
"Thats the point. Friendly keeps the city wheel from squealing so loud you hear them from the hills."
"What city?"
The question slipped out before he could stop it.
Serra flicked her eyes to the dim archway at the far end, where the corridor sloped upward into noise.
"The exchange is under the east quarter. You're breathing dirt that's older than the quarter itself."
She studied him.
"You really don't know where you are?"
"New,"
he said, leaving it there. He didn't owe this place more of himself than it had already taken.
The guards started unhooking a set of chains down the line—six prisoners in the tangle of iron and caution. Someone sobbed once, a small sound that tried to pretend it was a laugh and failed halfway through. A handler cuffed the man's ear without looking. The creature huffed happy dog-breath at the taste of fear and watched for an excuse to love its job.
When they reached Serra, the guard bent, key turning in a practiced rhythm. The cuff came off with a soft clank, the ankle shackle followed. Serra moved like someone who expected the floor to bite back. She didn't look at Nyx, except she did, and he caught it because he had learned to catch the small things: a flick, a line of attention like a thread stretched between bodies. Not a plea, not a promise—just proof she knew there was more out there than herself.
"Don't get clever,"
Calren murmured, almost like a prayer without a god attached.
"Wouldn't dream of it."
Good. Start with nightmares. Dreams cost too much."
They took her and five others. The line tightened , then slackened. The room breathed in, out.
Nyx stared at the cuff marks on his wrists and considered godhood—not because he believed in gods, but because in a place like this the idea that anything might be watching felt like a luxury you could only afford if you had stopped pretending you were going to live.
"First time?"
Calren asked after a pause.
"Feels like it."
"Thats how they get you—by making every time feel like a first time. You never build callus."
"You're full of cheer."
"Someone has to be. Else we'd start telling the truth."
Boots again. The six came back with new tags and new rope-burns on their wrists, only now the rope wasn't around them; it was trailing out of sight into the corridor like leashes cut short. The guards worked faster this time, shifting rows, calculating yield with eyes and fingers, weighing worth with the casual efficiency of a butcher at market. Serra returned to her place and sat with the precise care of a person who remembered where her body hurt even when her mind was elsewhere.
"Prices?"
Calren leaned forward slightly, making it sound casual as breath.
Serra's mouth flattened.
"Low on labor. High on pretty. Highest on teeth."
"Always the teeth. People who think they're wolves love buying teeth."
Serra caught Nyx looking.
"Don't look like that. It's a kind of speech. Just numbers."
"What does 'noble' fetch?"
Calren gave a small bark of laughter, strangling it quickly when a guard glanced over.
"Depends on how far you fell. And whether anyone still thinks it's fashionable to buy what used to be expensive."
"Great. I am an accessory."
"Sure. Ankle bracelet. Conversation piece. Reminder that coin turns faster than love."
"Love?"
He shrugged with his eyes.
"People buy what hurts them to own. Makes them feel powerful. You'd be surprised how many names wear their guilt like a cape."
"Not surprised. Just bored."
The torches had burned lower. The chamber felt smaller, like the walls had leaned in to hear secrets. Voices from the corridor came and went, rising with laughter that wasn't happy, or dipping into the soft murmur that happens when coin changes hands. A child cried somewhere far down the hall where the sound turned a corner and got lost among the stones. The chain at Nyx's ankles had left a numbness that made his feet feel like they weren't invited to his body anymore.
He tipped his head back to rest it against the wall and counted the torches. He made it to five before the count slipped away into ten, then seven, then a number that didn't belong in the series at all. Hunger sketched little stars at the edges of his vision. He let them be. Stars were nice. They didn't ask for anything but the patience to burn out.
"Eat when they hand you something,"
Serra murmured suddenly, low enough that only he and Calren could have caught it.
"Even if it smells like it hates you."
"Does food hate me?"
"Here? Everything does."
"Good. I was worried I'd have to earn it."
A slop bowl passed down the line a while later—something gray and warm and too thick to drink. A guard jabbed the ladle in like stabbing soup made it safer. Nyx took what was offered. It tasted like it had been food once — a long time ago in another life… perhaps. He forced it down until his body stopped treating it like a threat, then stopped before his pride choked him. Pride was a useless thing in a place where the line between animal and man was measured in how well you aimed your eyes.
Another rotation. Then a third. Each time, six bodies left, six returned with new marks, new rope-burns, new silences. A man two down from Nyx didn't come back. No one asked why Absence here was an answer all on its own.
At some point—hours or minutes, the chamber made those two things cousins—the woman with the high collar returned with a different set of guards and a different favor of attention. A bell rang somewhere overhead, small and clear like a glass throad being flicked.
"Final call."