The first night in the galleries passed like a slow execution.
Cold seeped from the stone floor into Leon's back, creeping through bone and marrow until he could no longer tell where his body ended and the mountain began. The chain at his ankle was cruelly measured—short enough to keep him pinned, long enough to let him feel the mockery of movement.
He tried once.
Scrrrape…
Dragging himself toward the nearest brazier—three paces, maybe four. The moment his right leg shifted—
—KRRRCH—
Shattered bone grated like broken pottery.
Pain detonated, white and blinding. His vision tunneled. He barely kept himself from blacking out. With a broken hiss between clenched teeth, Leon dragged himself back to the bench and collapsed.
He did not try again.
Around him, the cutters worked.
CLANG—CLINK—CLANG—
Chisels rang against black ore in a dull, endless rhythm. No voices. No mercy. No glances spared. Leon was already part of the scenery—another broken thing claimed by the mountain.
Claire finished her shift long after the blue torches guttered low.
She slid a chipped clay bowl across the stone toward him.
Scrrk.
Thin gruel. Gray-white like old snow, flecked with something granular—root powder, bone dust, maybe both.
"Eat."
No kindness. No cruelty. Just truth.
Leon's hands shook violently. He drank instead, swallowing the lukewarm sludge until the bowl was empty. The taste was… everything and nothing. Iron. Ash. And beneath it all, the faint metallic pulse of the vein itself.
Claire watched him.
"Tomorrow they'll decide what to do with you."
"Decide…?" he rasped.
"If you're worth feeding twice a day or once. If you're worth dragging to the surgeons or leaving for the wind."
She tapped the bench beside her own with a blood-crusted nail.
"Some come down here already useless. They don't last. The vein doesn't like dead weight."
Leon's gaze drifted to the wall.
Up close, the black ore looked less like stone and more like frozen night. Veins of violet light pulsed faintly through it, branching like capillaries beneath skin. When chisels struck true, the rock sang—
HUMMMMM—
A low note that vibrated in his ribs.
He felt it now.
Not a word.
A presence.
Mueor.
Claire followed his stare.
"You hear it."
Not a question.
"Since the city," Leon whispered. "Since the snow took me."
She laughed softly—short, bitter. "Lucky you. Most wait weeks. Some never hear anything at all. They just cut until their hands bleed and their minds go quiet."
She leaned closer, voice slipping beneath the clang of tools.
"When it speaks, don't fight it. Fighting makes it angry. Makes it push harder."
"What does it want?"
Claire shrugged one thin shoulder. "To be remembered. To be fed. To be free."
She traced the old burn scar along her forearm—precise, deliberate, almost ritualistic.
"Some say it's a god that forgot its own name. Some say it's what's left of those who tried to kill it before the Cataclysm."
Her eyes hardened.
"Doesn't matter. It chooses. We cut. The Mistress takes."
"The Mistress?"
Claire's gaze flicked toward the far end of the gallery, where a narrow stair spiraled upward into darkness.
"You'll meet her soon enough."
A pause.
"Pray your legs stay broken. She likes the ones who can't run."
She stood, joints popping like dry wood.
"Sleep if you can. Tomorrow they test you."
Then she limped away, swallowed by tunnels carved deeper into the mountain.
Leon lay back against the bench.
Pain had dulled into something worse—a constant grinding ache, like his joints were packed with broken glass. He closed his eyes, searching for the numb endurance that had carried him through eighteen winters in Aethelgard.
It didn't come.
Instead—
The whisper returned.
Softer now.
Almost tender.
Thirty-Seven.
Leon flinched.
The voice did not enter through his ears. It bloomed inside his skull like frost crawling across glass.
Thirty-Seven. Look.
He opened his eyes.
The gallery was empty.
The cutters were gone. Blue torches burned low, stretching shadows long and thin. In the wall opposite him, the vein pulsed once.
Thump.
Slow. Deliberate.
Look closer.
Every instinct screamed to turn away.
The pulse came again—stronger.
Thump.
Violet threads brightened. Dimmed. Brightened again.
A heartbeat calling him.
Leon dragged himself upright, elbows scraping stone.
RATTLE—
The chain protested.
He crawled—inch by agonizing inch—until his face hovered inches from the vein.
The rock smelled of ozone and old blood.
Inside the black—
Something moved.
Not light.
Not illusion.
A shape.
Humanoid. Folded in on itself like smoke trapped in ice.
It turned.
Leon felt its attention like fingers closing around his throat.
You are late.
The words were not sound. They were pressure. Cold sinking into marrow.
I waited.
Leon's nose bled again.
Blood dripped onto the stone—and did not freeze.
It smoked.
HISSSS—
Thin black threads curled upward, drawn into the vein.
The shape leaned closer.
You brought nothing. No weapon. No name worth keeping. Only pain. Only hunger.
A pause.
That will do.
—FLARE—
Violet light exploded, burning afterimages into Leon's vision.
Then—darkness.
When sight returned, the shape was gone.
But the vein had changed.
A hairline fracture split the black stone—fresh. Violent. At its base lay a single shard of ore, humming faintly.
MMMMMMMM—
Leon stared.
Then, trembling, he closed his broken fingers around it.
Pain roared—not from his legs, but from somewhere deeper. Behind his eyes.
Knowledge poured in.
Not words.
Visions.
A city of glass and silver collapsing in slow motion.
A sky tearing itself apart with light.
A woman with eyes like dying stars screaming a name he almost remembered.
Blood—his blood—running black across snow.
Silence.
Leon was curled on his side, gasping. The shard burned warm in his fist.
His heart hammered like it wanted out.
He looked down.
The stone was warm.
For the first time since the snow took him—
Leon smiled.
Small.
Crooked.
Dangerous.
The mountain had chosen him.
And now it had given him a tooth.
He tucked the shard beneath the rags at his chest, close to skin.
Tomorrow they would test him.
Tomorrow he would show them something new.
Something broken.
Something hungry.
Something that answered to Mueor.