A year beneath the earth had turned eight-year-old Ezekiel into something akin to a wild animal. His clothes had completely deteriorated into rags, his skin was washed clean of the city's soot but had turned a deathly pale, and his knees and elbows were covered in hard calluses from constantly crawling through the stone drifts.
He had learned to survive on a diet of bitter luminescent moss and rainwater seeping through the ceiling. But the human body could not grow on such rations. Ezekiel remained small, thin, and weak. He was constantly plagued by a light lightheadedness, and his muscles ached from exhaustion. He needed meat.
His first real prey was to be a cave needle-rat—a foul creature the size of a large dog, covered in bristles as stiff as wire. The rats were fast, aggressive, and possessed sharp incisors that could bite right through a human finger.
For an eight-year-old child to defeat such a creature in open combat was pure suicide. But Ezekiel had an advantage that the beast did not factor into its calculations—the geometry of the obsidian caves and his [Mirror Sight].
For three days, the boy observed the rat's watering hole by an underground stream. He did not look at it directly, so as not to betray his presence with an accidental rustle or the glint of the whites of his eyes. He sat behind a ledge of rock and stared at a mirror-smooth fracture of black slate.
In the reflection, the world of Dundan took on sharp, albeit colorless, contours. Ezekiel saw the rat cautiously slinking along the wall, its vibrissae whiskers twitching. On its grey carcass, right between the shoulder blades, a vulnerable point flickered in the mirror spectrum—a tiny, pale speck where the subcutaneous bony armor was at its thinnest.
Ezekiel prepared a trap. In the narrow passageway through which the rat returned to its burrow, he wedged several long, razor-sharp obsidian shards between the stones. They jutted out from the ground at an angle, pointed against the beast's direction of movement.
The boy himself hid in a narrow niche slightly higher up the slope. In his small hand, he clutched the heaviest and sharpest piece of obsidian he had managed to chip away from a vein. His palm was wrapped in a piece of dirty cloth to avoid cutting his own fingers.
The wait was long. The chill of the cave crept under his rags, causing his body to shiver slightly. But Ezekiel knew how to endure. The dungeon had quickly cured him of impatience. False haste here was punishable by death.
Finally, movement appeared in the reflection of the crystal in front of his face. The needle-rat was returning. It walked slowly, catching a rich scent—Ezekiel had left a bait near the trap, a piece of a crushed cave beetle.
A step. Another.
The rat reached for the bait, completely lowering its guard.
Ezekiel didn't make a sound. He guided himself by the mirror on the wall. When the rat's silhouette in the reflection lined up with a pale mark the boy had scratched onto the floor beforehand, he lunged sharply out of his hiding place and threw his entire weight downward.
The beast managed to react—subterranean predators possessed colossal speed. It spun on the spot, intending to leap at its aggressor, but this maneuver proved fatal. Trying to spring away, the rat slammed its underbelly at full speed into the obsidian knives embedded in the ground.
A piercing, ear-splitting shriek filled the dark tunnel. The obsidian easily ripped through the soft hide. The rat thrashed, breaking crystals, as dark, almost black blood poured from its wounds.
Breathing heavily, Ezekiel found himself right above it. His heart hammered wildly, fear screaming in his head: "Run! It can still bite!" But hunger and cold fury proved stronger.
The boy gripped his obsidian shard with both hands and, crying out from the exertion—it was the first sound he had uttered in months—he drove the blade exactly into the flickering speck between the beast's shoulder blades. The stone punctured the vertebrae with a crunch.
The shrieking cut off. The beast twitched one last time and went still.
Ezekiel fell to his knees beside it. His arms were stained up to the elbows in hot blood that smelled of iron and musk. It felt scaldingly warm in this freezing cave.
He looked at his palms, then at his defeated foe. At that moment, something shifted imperceptibly inside his consciousness, like ice on a river in spring. A cold, systemic knowledge surfaced, one that required no words:
[Amalgam Development: Progress 12%] Your body has absorbed the first spark of a subterranean creature's life force. Raw mana begins to restructure the channels.
The boy didn't think about magic. He took a sharp shard of stone and began clumsily, obeying only primal instinct, to carve the meat from the rat's bones. He ate it raw, right there in the dark, smearing his face and choking with greed. This meat brought back his strength. It provided warmth.
That night, for the first time in a year, Ezekiel fell asleep not from weakness, but from fullness. He slept on the hard stone, curled into a ball, with his blood-stained obsidian knife lying beside him.
He had spilled first blood in this dungeon. And now, Dundan had finally claimed him as its own.