The screams always started the same way.
"Aiden! Run!"
Little legs pumped frantically across marble floors slick with crimson. The five-year-old's bare feet slapped against stone that had once gleamed white but now reflected the dancing flames consuming the tapestries. Behind him, the sound of steel meeting flesh echoed through corridors that had been his playground just hours before.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Heavy boots. Getting closer.
"Mama!" His voice cracked, high and desperate, as he stumbled around a corner. The great hall stretched before him: a cavern of shadows and dying light. Bodies lay scattered like broken dolls across the floor. Men and women in fine silks, their faces... their faces were...
Gone. Smooth. Featureless flesh where eyes and mouths should have been.
But he knew them anyway. Uncle Marcus, who had taught him to hold a wooden sword. Cousin Elena, who always saved him the sweetest honey cakes from the kitchen. Lady Catherine, his father's wife, who had never been cruel despite his bastard birth.
All of them stared at him with those terrible, empty faces.
"Please," he whispered, pressing himself against a pillar carved with the family crest... a silver tree beneath twin moons. "Please, I'll be good. I'll be quiet. I won't ask for anything ever again."
The faceless figures began to turn toward him, moving with the jerky, unnatural gait of marionettes. Their mouths opened where mouths should have been, releasing sounds like wind through broken glass.
"Bastard."
"Worthless."
"Should have drowned you at birth."
Lady Catherine, or the thing wearing her form, reached for him with fingers that stretched impossibly long. Where her wedding ring had been, bone showed through rotting flesh.
"This is what you're worth."
The scene shattered like glass, fragments of memory cutting deep as they fell away. Now he was older, ten, maybe eleven, chained to a post in a courtyard of grey stone. The leather whip sang through the air behind him, and he knew, with the terrible certainty of dreams, exactly when it would strike.
CRACK!
Fire bloomed across his back. Not the clean pain of a blade, but the deep, tearing agony that burrowed into muscle and bone. His scream echoed off stone walls that seemed to stretch up forever, disappearing into a sky the color of dried blood.
"Count them, slave."
The voice belonged to everyone and no one. His first master. His second. The overseer with the broken teeth who liked to aim for the same spot twice.
CRACK!
"One," he gasped, tasting copper on his tongue.
CRACK!
"Two." The word came out as more of a sob. He was sixteen again, not a child, but the pain made him feel small and helpless.
CRACK!
"Three." His knees buckled, chains around his wrists taking his full weight. The metal bit deep, but that was nothing compared to the fire spreading across his back.
CRACK!
CRACK!
CRACK!
The count became meaningless. Numbers dissolved into raw sound, into the wet slap of leather against torn flesh, into the sound of his own breathing getting shallower and more ragged with each strike.
"This is what you are," the voice whispered, intimate as a lover. "This is all you'll ever be. Broken. Bleeding. Begging for scraps of mercy that will never come."
Another strike landed, but this one felt different. Real. The pain shot through his sleeping body like lightning, dragging him up from the depths of nightmare toward...
Aiden's eyes snapped open.
The dormitory ceiling stared back at him. Rotting wood beams barely visible in the pre-dawn darkness. His back screamed where yesterday's punishment had left its mark, the welts still tender and weeping. For a moment, caught between sleep and waking, he could still feel the phantom weight of chains around his wrists.
He lay perfectly still, counting his breaths until the trembling stopped. Around him, two dozen other bodies shifted and snored in their narrow cots, but none had woken. Good. The last thing he needed was questions about why he'd been whimpering in his sleep again.
Carefully, he sat up, biting back a groan as the movement pulled at his injuries. Through the single, grimy window, the sky was lightening from black to deep purple. Soon, the work bell would ring, and another day in the granite quarries would begin.
But not yet. For now, he had maybe ten minutes of peace.
He swung his legs over the side of the cot, bare feet touching the cold stone floor. The dormitory smelled of unwashed bodies, stale bread, and the lingering copper scent of blood that seemed to follow him everywhere these days. Forty-three other workers crammed into a space meant for twenty, all of them bound by the same copper collars that marked them as property of the Drakmoor Mining Consortium.
Aiden touched his own collar absently, feeling the raised sigil that declared him slave rather than citizen. The metal had worn smooth against his skin over the past six years, but it still felt heavy. Heavier than the chains they put on him during transport. Heavier than the pickaxe he would swing for the next fourteen hours.
The boy in the next cot over, Tam, barely thirteen and already bent from too much heavy lifting... muttered something in his sleep and rolled over. His face, even in rest, held the hollow look of someone who had given up hoping for anything better.
Aiden had worn that same expression for years. Maybe he still did.
He stood slowly, joints protesting after another night on the thin mattress that was more straw than comfort. The welts on his back pulled tight, reminding him why he'd earned yesterday's beating. Twenty lashes for "insubordination", really for not lowering his eyes fast enough when Overseer Markus had walked past.
"You look at me like you think you're equal," Markus had said, voice thick with drink and casual cruelty. "Time you remembered your place."
Twenty lashes. Not the worst he'd endured, but far from the lightest. At sixteen, Aiden had collected enough scars to tell the story of his captivity without words. Each mark was a lesson: keep your head down, speak only when spoken to, and never, ever let them see you thinking.
Because he was always thinking. Always watching. Always remembering.
The window drew him like it did every morning. Through the cracked glass, he could see the first hint of dawn touching the peaks of the Ironwall Mountains that surrounded the quarry. In the distance, barely visible through the morning mist, the grand mansions of the mine owners caught the early light. Soft yellow glows from their windows spoke of warm fires, full bellies, and beds that didn't leave you aching.
Once, he thought, the way he thought it every morning, I lived in a place like that.
But that was another life. Another boy. That boy had worn silk instead of rough-spun wool. That boy had learned letters and numbers instead of which rocks yielded the best granite. That boy had been called "young master" by servants who bowed when he passed. "Bastard" by others who were jealous of his upbringing. "Son" by his father and his mother. "Baby brother" by his siblings.
The boy who was all of that was dead. Had been dead for ten years, since the night faceless men came to claim what remained of his family's holdings and reduce its people to property.
All that was left was Aiden. No family name, because the naming ceremony usually happened after the children awakened. And at six he hadn't. It was because of not having the last name that he survived the massacre. Even though he wouldn't recommend a life as a slave to anyone over swift, cold death. But slaves can't even commit suicide. The shackles would render them unconscious and then the overseers will kill them a hundred times before putting them back at their task.
He didn't had any inheritance. For all that his family owned had been looted, robbed, and sold.
And he had no future, because slaves weren't allowed to dream. Not in this quarry owned by the Drakmoor Mining Consortium.
Here he was just Aiden. Slave. Property. A pair of hands for moving stone and a back for taking punishment.
The sky was definitely lighter now. Purple fading to grey, with the first edge of gold creeping over the mountain peaks. In minutes, the work bell would ring, and the dormitory would explode into grudging motion as forty-four bodies tried to dress, relieve themselves, and choke down their morning gruel before the overseers arrived with their whips and their schedules.
He could already hear movement from the overseer barracks across the yard. Soon, very soon, another day of backbreaking labor would begin.
But for now, in these last few moments of peace, Aiden allowed himself to do what he did every morning. He reached beneath his thin mattress and pulled out the small piece of granite he'd hidden there, smooth and dark, worn to a perfect oval by months of handling. On its surface, barely visible in the dim light, he'd scratched seven tiny marks with a nail.
Seven names. Seven faces he could still remember clearly, even after all these years.
Lord Commander Voss, who had led the attack. Magistrate Cornelius, who had declared the family's assets forfeit. Merchant Prince Aldric, who had bought the him at the auction.
And four others. Names he'd learned through careful listening, patient observation, and the kind of memory that came from pure, distilled hatred.
Someday, he would find them. Someday, he would make them remember what they had done to House...
No. Better not to think the name, even in the privacy of his own mind. That name belonged to the dead boy. Aiden was nobody. Had always been nobody.
He slipped the stone back beneath his mattress just as the work bell began to ring across the quarry compound. Around him, bodies stirred and groaned as another day of servitude began.
Time to put on his mask. Time to be the obedient slave who never looked up, never spoke back, never showed a hint of the fire that burned in his chest like a living coal.
Time to pretend he had forgotten how to hate.
Aiden pulled on his work clothes and joined the shuffling line toward the door, just another face in the crowd of the broken and the forgotten. But as he stepped out into the grey morning air, his fingers brushed against the collar at his throat.
Someday, he promised the ghosts that haunted his dreams. Someday, I'll make them all pay.
The overseer's whistle cut through the air like a blade, and Aiden lowered his eyes and fell into step with the others, carrying his secrets like stones in his chest.
Another day began.