The morning began with iron.
Chains scraped against stone as the slaves were driven into the yard, their movements clumsy under the weight of rusted shackles. The sound was so constant, so unchanging, that it had ceased to be noticed. To them it was not noise , it was life.
Among them walked a boy. Thin, silent, and bare-footed, his steps were neither hurried nor hesitant. Dust clung to his skin, scars latticed his back, but his face was still. His eyes, dark and unblinking, held no spark of rebellion — yet neither did they carry surrender.
His name was not truly his own. None of them had names. But branded into the flesh of his back, etched by fire and ink, were two words
Alpha Omega
The overseers laughed at it sometimes, mocking the grandness of the title on a nameless slave. But the boy had taken those words for himself. He carried them not as shame, but as the only thing he owned in a world that denied him everything else.
He had no family, no memories of parents or kin. His first memory was of chains. His first lesson was silence. Words, he had learned, were dangerous. Too many questions brought lashes. Too much hope brought punishment. So he watched, and endured.
The sun climbed, hot and merciless. The overseer's whip cracked, splitting the air, driving the slaves to their labor. They hauled stones, carried water, scrubbed walls that would never be clean. They broke their bodies for nobles who never looked at them.
The boy did not complain. His hands bled, his shoulders burned, but he moved as though the pain belonged to someone else. Others cursed under their breath, some wept, but Alpha's lips never parted.
He was not stronger than them. He was not faster. Yet, in some way, he lasted where others broke.
---
At night, when the slaves were herded into the pit to sleep, Alpha would sit against the wall, knees drawn to his chest, eyes tracing the cracks in the ceiling. The others would whisper about escape, about revolt, about gods that might pity them. He listened, but never joined.
Dreams were dangerous. They gave men something to lose.
Still, in the hollow of his chest, something stirred. Not hope, but a question he could never silence: ' Why am I here? Why me?'
He did not know the answer. The overseers didn't care. To them, he was just another body to be used until it broke.
---
The mark on his back, though, remained. Alpha Omega. Sometimes he thought of it in the quiet hours. Alpha — the beginning. Omega — the end. A circle, perhaps. A chain. Or maybe a lie.
But if it was a lie, it was his.
When others mocked him, he never responded. When they sneered, he remained silent. And slowly, that silence began to unsettle even the other slaves.
"Strange boy," they muttered.
"Doesn't cry. Doesn't laugh."
He heard them. He simply did not care. Words were useless. Chains did not break with words.
---
Once, a fellow slave tried to befriend him. A boy younger than him, no more than twelve, whispered in the night, asking his name, asking if they could look out for each other. Alpha turned to him, met his eyes for a moment, then looked away without answering.
By the next week, the boy was gone. Too weak, too slow, too noisy.
Alpha never asked what happened. He already knew.
---
Fifteen years. That was his life. A chain that had never broken.
But inside that silence, something hardened. Not kindness, not faith, not hope. Something colder. A refusal.
He would not bow in his heart, even if his body was shackled.
And though no one knew it, not even himself, the boy with no family, no voice, no freedom, carried within him the faintest ember of defiance.
The overseers saw only a quiet slave. The other slaves saw only a strange boy.
But one day, the world would learn his name.
Alpha Omega.
The beginning, and the end.
---