The gruel tasted like despair mixed with sawdust.
Aiden forced himself to swallow another spoonful of the grey slop that passed for breakfast, ignoring the way it scraped down his throat like liquid sand. Around him, forty-three other slaves hunched over their wooden bowls in the mess hall, a generous name for what was little more than a stone shed with rotting benches. The silence was absolute except for the scrape of spoons against wood and the occasional wet cough that spoke of lungs slowly filling with granite dust.
Three minutes. That's how long they had to consume their morning ration before the work whistle blew again.
The boy across from him, Joren, maybe nineteen but looking twice that, stared at his bowl with the hollow eyes of someone who had long since stopped tasting food. A livid bruise covered the left side of his face where Overseer Boris had struck him yesterday for stumbling under the weight of a stone block. The bruise was purple-black at the center, fading to sickly yellow at the edges.
Tomorrow it'll be green, Aiden thought automatically. He'd learned to read the progression of injuries like a calendar. Yellow meant healing. Green meant almost healed. Black meant fresh pain.
His own back throbbed as he shifted on the hard bench, the welts from yesterday's whipping still tender. Sleep had been fitful, every movement had pulled at the cuts, sending fresh waves of fire across his shoulders. But complaining about pain was a luxury slaves couldn't afford. Weakness invited attention, and attention from the overseers was never the kind you wanted.
The whistle shrieked.
Forty-four bodies moved as one, abandoning their bowls and filing toward the quarry entrance in a practiced shuffle. No one spoke. Speaking during work transition was worth five lashes, and everyone had learned that lesson the hard way.
The morning air bit at Aiden's face as they emerged from the mess hall.
Autumn was settling over the Ironwall Mountains, painting the peaks with snow and sending ice-touched winds down into the valley where the quarry sprawled like a wound in the earth. Soon, winter would come, and with it the killing cold that claimed three or four slaves every year.
The weak ones. The sick ones. The unlucky ones who drew the wrong shift and found themselves working the exposed faces when the mountain storms rolled in.
Overseer Hartwell stood at the tool shed, his copper badge of authority gleaming against his thick wool coat. The contrast wasn't lost on anyone. He wore layers of fine clothing while the slaves shivered in their thin work shirts and patched trousers. His breath misted in the cold air as he called out work assignments, consulting a slate board with practiced indifference.
"Block hauling crew, north face. Krin, you're team leader. If anyone drops a load, the whole crew gets docked rations." His eyes swept over them like a man counting livestock.
"Face workers, east wall. Watch the loose shale, we don't need another cave-in slowing production. And if I catch anyone taking unauthorized rest breaks..."
He let the threat hang in the air. Everyone knew what happened to workers caught resting.
Twenty lashes if it was your first offense. Forty for the second. After that, they sold you to the deep mines where life expectancy was measured in days rather than years.
Aiden found himself assigned to the cutting crew, the men who worked closest to the quarry face, splitting granite blocks with sledgehammers and wedges.
It was brutal work that left your shoulders screaming and your hands raw with blisters, but it was better than hauling. The haulers had to carry the finished blocks up the quarry's steep ramps, their backs bent under weights that would break a mule.
He collected his tools, a twenty-pound sledgehammer with a handle worn smooth by countless hands, a set of iron wedges, and a small pick for clearing debris. The metal felt familiar in his grip, extensions of his own body after six years of repetitive motion.
Lift, swing, split. Lift, swing, split.
Thousands of times each day until the rhythm became as automatic as breathing.
The quarry face rose before him like a grey cliff, marked with the scars of constant excavation. Wooden scaffolding clung to the rock like spider webs, providing precarious footing for the workers who chipped away at humanity's eternal hunger for stone. Far above, the rim of the quarry caught the morning sun, but down here in the depths, shadows lingered like pools of cold water.
"Move, you worthless dogs!" Overseer Kaine's voice cracked like his whip as he strode between the work crews. "The Consortium expects fifty blocks today, and by the gods, they'll get fifty blocks or you'll work by torchlight until they do!"
Aiden positioned his first wedge against a promising crack in the granite and raised his hammer. The weight felt heavier than usual, yesterday's punishment had left his back stiff and his shoulders weak. But weakness was a luxury he couldn't afford. Not with Kaine prowling the work site like a hunting cat.
The hammer came down with a satisfying ring of metal on metal. The wedge bit deeper into the stone, widening the natural fissure. He repositioned and swung again. And again. Each impact sent vibrations up through the handle and into his already aching arms, but gradually the crack began to spread.
Ring. Ring. Ring.
The sound echoed off the quarry walls, joining with the hammering of two dozen other workers in a chaotic symphony of labor.
Stone dust filled the air, coating everything in a fine grey powder that worked its way into clothes, hair, and lungs with each breath. By evening, they would all be coughing up grey phlegm, the quarry's signature, marking them as surely as their copper collars.
Hours passed. The sun climbed higher, bringing no warmth to the shadowed depths where they worked. Aiden's shirt was soaked with sweat despite the cold, his muscles burning with the familiar ache of repetitive strain. The block he'd been working on showed promising cracks now, maybe another hour of careful work would split it free from the face.
A shadow fell across his work area. He looked up to see Tam, the young boy from the dormitory, struggling with a block twice his size. The kid couldn't be more than ninety pounds soaking wet, but they'd assigned him to moving crew anyway.
His face was red with strain, tendons standing out in his thin neck as he tried to shift the granite slab onto a wooden skid.
He's going to drop it, Aiden realized with growing dread. And when he did, the whole crew would lose their evening meal.
That was the rule, collective punishment for individual failure. It kept the slaves policing each other, preventing the kind of solidarity that might lead to organized resistance.
But more immediately, if Tam dropped that block, it might crush his foot. Or his leg. And injured slaves who couldn't work were sold to the fighting pits as fodder or simply left to die.
Aiden glanced around quickly. Kaine was twenty yards away, berating a stone-cutter for working too slowly. The other overseers were scattered across the quarry floor, their attention focused elsewhere. Maybe...
"You there! Slave!"
The voice boomed across the quarry with the authority of absolute power. Every head turned, every hammer stilled, as Overseer Drayton descended the wooden stairs from the administrative platform. He was a big man, thick through the chest and shoulders, with the kind of casual cruelty that came from years of unchecked authority.
But it wasn't his size that made the slaves shrink back. It was what he could do with his mind.
Drayton was awakened, one of the not-so-rare individuals who had unlocked the power that lay dormant in most human souls. Most of the overseers here were awakened. But he was one of the rare ones who had been professionally trained. And he had served in the miliary, something which he liked to talk a lot about.
His particular gift was telekinesis, the ability to move objects with thought alone. It was a common enough ability among the awakened, but in Drayton's hands, it became an instrument of exquisite torture. Something he had sharped to perfection during his time as a soldier.
His eyes swept over the work crews like a predator selecting prey. "Productivity is down fifteen percent from last week," he announced, his voice carrying easily across the quarry. "Fifteen percent! Do you maggots think the Consortium pays good coin so you can slack off like lazy house cats?"
No one answered. Everyone knew better than to speak when Drayton was in one of his moods.
"Maybe you need a reminder of what happens to workers who don't earn their keep." His gaze settled on something behind Aiden. "You. Girl. Come here."
Aiden's blood turned to ice water. He knew without looking who Drayton had chosen. Sarah, one of the few older female slaves in the quarry. She was maybe twenty-five, with the kind of quiet dignity that somehow survived even in this place. She never complained, never caused trouble, never drew attention to herself.
Which made her perfect for Drayton's demonstrations.
The sound of her footsteps was like a funeral march as she approached the overseer. Her face was pale but composed, hands steady at her sides. She knew what was coming. They all did.
"Strip," Drayton commanded casually, as if asking her to pass the salt.
The quarry fell silent except for the whistle of wind across the stone faces. Sarah's hands went to the ties of her work shirt with mechanical precision. She'd been through this before. They all had, in one way or another.
"Wait," Drayton said, holding up a hand. A cruel smile played across his lips. "I have a better idea."
His eyes narrowed in concentration, and Sarah suddenly gasped as invisible hands began tugging at her clothes. The telekinetic force was precise, almost gentle, which somehow made it worse than outright violence. Her shirt pulled itself open, buttons popping free to scatter on the stone. Her belt unbuckled itself. Her trousers began to slide down her hips.
She stood frozen, tears streaming down her face, as Drayton's power stripped her bare in front of forty-three other slaves. The humiliation was total, absolute, designed to break something fundamental in the human spirit.
But it was her scream that cut deepest. Not the sound itself, though that was terrible enough, but what it awakened in Aiden's memory.
***
"Brother! Help me!"
Suddenly he wasn't in the quarry anymore. He was five years old again, hiding behind a tapestry as armored men dragged his half-sister Lyanna from her chambers. She was calling his name, reaching for him with desperate fingers as they pulled her toward the door. Toward a fate he'd been too young to fully understand but old enough to fear.
"Please, Aiden! Don't let them..."
***
The memory shattered as Sarah's scream peaked. Drayton was lifting her now, suspending her naked body in midair while his power probed and stretched and violated with invisible fingers. Her back arched as she tried to escape the touches that came from everywhere and nowhere, but there was no escape from a power that worked directly on the mind.
That could have been Lyanna, Aiden thought, his vision going red around the edges. That could have been my sister.
If she had survived whatever had happened to her during the attack all those years ago.
His hands clenched around the hammer handle so tightly that the wood creaked. Every instinct screamed at him to act, to intervene, to smash Drayton's skull open and end this obscenity. The tool in his hands felt suddenly light as air, as if the rage burning in his chest could give him the strength to move mountains.
But he didn't move. Couldn't move. Because even through the red haze of fury, cold calculation whispered in the back of his mind. If he attacked Drayton, he would die. Messily. Publicly. And his death would accomplish nothing except giving the overseer an excuse to pick another victim.
So he watched. And hated. And burned the image into his memory alongside all the other horrors he would someday repay with interest.
Sarah's ordeal lasted ten minutes, ten minutes that felt like hours. When Drayton finally released her, she collapsed to the stone floor like a broken doll, sobbing and trying to cover herself with hands that shook like autumn leaves.
"Let that be a lesson," Drayton announced, straightening his coat with casual indifference. "Productivity will improve, or we'll have more demonstrations. Now get back to work."
The quarry exploded into frantic activity as slaves threw themselves into their tasks with desperate energy. No one wanted to be the next demonstration. No one wanted to give Drayton an excuse to return.
Even Tam was now being more careful in his strikes.
Aiden raised his hammer and brought it down on the wedge with enough force to crack the iron. The blow rang out like a bell, but all he could hear was Sarah's screams echoing in the chambers of his memory.
Someday, he promised silently as he swung again. The wedge bit deeper into the granite, splitting it along its natural grain. Someday, I'll make you scream like that.
The hammer came down again and again, each blow driven by a fury that burned brighter than forge fire. Stone dust coated his face like tears, but his eyes stayed dry. He had no tears left to shed.
Only rage. Only the promise of eventual justice.
Only the slow, patient work of remembering every face, every name, every cruelty that would someday demand payment in blood.
The granite finally split with a sound like thunder, revealing the clean heart of the stone beneath. But Aiden barely noticed. His mind was elsewhere, cataloging sins and planning retribution.
The work continued. The sun climbed higher. And deep in the darkness of his heart, something cold and patient began to stir.