They brought Gareth back after evening meal, dragging his broken body into the dormitory like a sack of spoiled meat.
His wounds were partially healed and the burn on the neck was almost gone other than the scabs that marred its geography.
The guards dropped him onto his cot without ceremony, not caring that several of his bones were still clearly broken or that dark bruises covered his skin like poisonous flowers.
But the physical damage was nothing compared to what they'd done to his mind.
Gareth lay on his back, staring at the ceiling with eyes that saw things that weren't there.
Every few seconds, he would mutter something under his breath—fragments of words that might once have been sentences, sounds that might once have been language. Spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth, and occasionally he would let out a soft giggle that raised the hair on the back of Aiden's neck.
"Those bastards!" Willem cursed.
"What happened?" Marcus asked. Trying not to move from where he lay on his cot.
"They broke his core," Willem whispered from the cot beside Gareth's.
The older slave's face was grim in the dim light filtering through the single window.
"I have seen it before, in the deep mines. They call it soul-death. Body keeps working, mostly, but the mind..."
He shook his head.
"Nothing left upstairs but fragments."
"Can it be fixed?" Aiden asked, though he already knew the answer from Willem's expression.
"Core-breaking is permanent, lad. Whatever made him human, it's gone now. Best we can hope for is that he dies quickly."
As if summoned by their conversation, Gareth's voice drifted across the dormitory. A sing-song mumble that might have been a lullaby or a prayer or simply the sound of a broken mind trying to process a broken world.
"Mother, mother, pretty mother... she had such soft hands... soft hands for soft boys... but the stone is hard, mother, the stone is so very hard..."
Several slaves pulled their thin blankets over their heads, trying to shut out the sound.
But Aiden lay listening, letting the words burn themselves into his memory alongside all the other horrors he would someday repay.
Drayton did this, he thought, his hands clenching into fists beneath his blanket. He didn't just break the boy's bones, he broke his soul. Took everything that made him human and ground it to powder for the entertainment of watching slaves.
The rage that had been building since Sarah's humiliation crystallized into something harder and colder than granite. Not the hot fury of a moment, but the patient, calculating hatred that could wait years for the perfect opportunity to strike.
I'm going to kill him, Aiden realized with perfect clarity. Not quickly. Not cleanly. I'm going to make him scream the way he made Gareth scream. I'm going to break him piece by piece until he's begging for death.
But Drayton wasn't the only one who deserved retribution. Kaine had started it with his casual cruelty. The guards had carried out the order without question. The Consortium officials who ran the quarry had created a system where such horrors were not just possible but routine.
They all had blood on their hands. They all deserved to pay.
Lord Commander Voss. Magistrate Cornelius. Merchant Prince Aldric. Overseer Drayton. Overseer Kaine. Overseer Markus. The Consortium. The Guards. The other Overseers.
So many new names now, the list ever growing.
Every day brought fresh cruelties, new faces to remember, new debts to be paid in full.
Across the dormitory, Gareth's mumbling continued, a broken lullaby that spoke of soft hands and hard stones and the places where sanity went to die. Other slaves tossed restlessly in their sleep, disturbed by dreams that echoed with the sounds of snapping bones and shattering minds.
Aiden lay perfectly still, his eyes fixed on the rotting ceiling beams, his mind crystal clear with purpose. In the darkness behind his eyelids, he could see faces—the faces of everyone who had ever raised a hand against him or those around him.
All these years of seething, waiting, being a submissive broken slave trying to get by and survive.
No more! He could feel something stir in him. Making him feel like he could soon make or break this world. Or he was finally losing it!
I remember you all, he thought, and the words carried the weight of a blood oath.
Every face. Every name. Every cruelty you've inflicted on the helpless and the broken.
The dormitory grew quiet except for Gareth's occasional muttering and the soft sounds of troubled sleep. But Aiden's mind was anything but quiet. Behind his closed eyes, plans formed and reformed like storm clouds gathering on a distant horizon.
Someday, I'll be strong enough to make you pay.
Someday, I'll have the power to show you what it feels like to be helpless. To be broken. To lie in the dirt while someone destroys everything that makes you human.
Someday I will become vengeance.
He thought of the three awakened slaves in their hidden cave, slowly rebuilding powers that had been suppressed but not destroyed. Thought of Willem's light-bending, Jon's telekinesis, Marcus's fire.
They had been wounded once, but they were healing. Growing stronger.
Learning.
I will ask them to teach me, he thought, and the words were both plea and command.
Teach me how to unlock the power sleeping in my soul.
Teach me how to become something more than a victim.
Gareth's voice rose slightly, catching on what might have been a sob. "The stone remembers, mother... the stone remembers everything... hard and cold and remembering..."
Yes, Aiden thought, and his lips curved in something that wasn't quite a smile.
The stone remembers everything. And so will I.
Sleep, when it finally came, brought dreams of fire and screaming and the sweet music of justice finally served.
In those dreams, Aiden wasn't a slave cowering in the darkness.
He was something else entirely.
Something patient. Something hungry.
Something that remembered every slight and would someday collect every debt in full, with interest compounded by years of suffering.
The boy who had once been a noble's bastard was dying by degrees in the quarry's depths.
But something darker was taking his place. Something that would not be broken by whips or chains or the casual cruelty of small men drunk on borrowed power.
Something that was learning, very slowly, to hate with the perfect purity of winter ice.
And in the morning, when the work bell rang and another day of slavery began, that something would continue its patient vigil, watching and waiting and remembering.
Building strength for the reckoning that was coming.