The world did not return to her eyes with a bang, but with a low rumble.
It started in the marrow of her bones, a low, uncomfortable hum that set her teeth on edge and made the very fluid in her eyes tremble. Then came the sound — a high, crystalline chime that felt like it was possessing her mind.
However beautiful it was in a vacuum didn't matter to her. The chime resonated through the heavy collar of iron and etched glass clamped around her throat, it felt like a serrated blade being drawn across her nerves.
Asteria's eyes snapped open.
She wasn't on the throne of the Palace. There was no sand and no blistering sun of the desert. Instead there was a smell of lye, pulverized stone, and the copper tang of old blood.
She tried to gasp, but the shackle around her neck tightened. The runes carved into the metal flared with a dim light, suppressing her vocal chords. She was a "Queen" no longer. She was a mute, shadow of her former self.
A slave.
Asteria sat up, her head swimming. She was lying on a shelf of old, damp cloth in a room that smelled of too many bodies and not enough hope.
Around her, dozens of others were rising in the dim, bio-luminescent gloom. They moved like clockwork, their faces etched with hollow despair.
None of them spoke, none of them could. The chime signaled the start of their cycle; attempting to make a sound is to invite the shackles around their necks to choke the life from their lungs.
A shadow loomed over her — a man in a breastplate of reinforced glass, holding a rod that hummed with the same frequency as the chime. He jabbed that rod into her shoulder. A burst of white-hot agony surged through her, and all she could do was grit her teeth. The man pointed towards the translucent doors at the end of the barracks.
When she stood, her legs felt heavy, as if the very gravity of thus place was trying to pull her into the earth. She looked at her hands — they were raw, the nails cracked, and the skin stained with a silvery dust that shimmered even in the dark.
'Damnation, my life can't get any worse can it?' She thought, her inner voice a snarl of rage.
***
The walk to the mine head was a descent into a vertical purgatory.
The Kingdom of Glass — Aethelgard — was not just a city; It was more like a labyrinth. As she was marched out of the barracks and onto the narrow sky-bridges of the "Lower-Quarter" she would call it.
Asteria caught her first real glimpses of the kingdom at its peak. It was breathtaking. Spired palaces of white and blue glass reached towards the ceiling of the cavern, reflecting the glow of a thousand lamps.
But they — to Asteria's dismay — were not heading for the light. They were heading for the dark.
The Maw was a massive, circular shaft that dropped kilometers into the crust of the world. At its edges, thousands of slaves like her moved on pulleys and rusted elevators, disappearing into the mist. The mist was the pulervized remains of the Kingdom's greed. Without the protective charms of the overseers, it acted like microscopic glass shards, slowly shredding the lungs of the workers from the inside out.
Asteria felt the first prickle of it in her throat. It was a dry, stinging heat.
"Move." A voice echoed — not through the air, but directly into her mind via the shackle.
She was shoved into a cage of iron and glass. Beside her stood a man so thin his ribs looked like the rafters of a ruined house. His eyes were wide and glazed, staring at nothing. As the cage began to drop, the air grew colder and the pressure mounted.
They descended for what felt like hours, passing through layers of rock until they hit the veins of Moonlight. Moonlight was the material most weapons and armour were made from within this kingdom. It was an opaque, pale blue material.
The cavern walls weren't stone. Instead, they were a riot of luminous crystal. The glass glowed with a flickering blue light, pulsing like a living heart. This was the raw essence of this kingdom — unrefined, volatile and hungry.
It was beautiful, but as Asteria looked at the discarded bones of slaves littering the floor of the shaft, she knew the price of that beauty — and maybe she was next.
The cage hit the bottom with a jarring thud.
A Taskmaster stood at the gate, his face obscured by an opaque glass mass. He killed a pile of tools towards them. "Take them. Your quota is five shards. If you break a vein, you'll die; if you don't meet the quota you'll starve."
Asteria reached down and gripped a pickaxe. The handle was wood but the head was a wedge of rusted, industrial metal. It felt unbalanced and crude.
But she did what she had to do — she turned towards the wall of Moonlight.
Mining Moonlight was not a matter of strength, but a matter of guesswork, hopes and prayers.
Moonlight was formed by the dead, to put it bluntly. There was essence trapped inside of the glass — similar to soul shards — and was under immense amounts of pressure. Strike it with too much force, and the internal tension would release it in an explosive shatter — the blast alone able to turn a human being into rest mist in seconds. Strike it too softly and the pickaxe would bounce off the surface, dulling the edge and wasting your own energy.
Asteria watched the man beside her. He was a slave, just like her. He raised his pick and struck the wall with a desperate, shaky swing.
Ting.
The glass groaned. A spiderweb of cracks appeared, glowing with an angry, turquoise light. The man whimpered, dropping his pick and scrambling back. The air around the crack began to shimmer in response.
The Taskmasker didn't move to help — it wasn't his job to — instead, he sat and watched with a wry smile.
The shimmer intensified, and then — snap. A tiny shard of glass flew out from the wall like a bullet, piercing the man's throat. He slumped over, clutching his neck as the shackle suppressed his death rattle.
The Taskmasker looked at Asteria. "Next."
Asteria stepped forward. Her heart was hammering against her ribs, but her mind was beginning to clear. The panic of the transition was fading, replaced by the cold, analytical focus of someone who was desperate to survive.
She raised the pickaxe, but she didn't swing, instead she focused on the vein in front of her, trusting her attribute would do the rest.
And thankfully, it did.
The blinding glare of the Moonlight softened. The chaotic glow of the cavern faded, replaced by a complex network of lines — bright, glowing threads that ran through the glass like a map of nerves.
To the naked eye, the wall was a solid mass of crystal. To Asteria it might as well have been a puzzle, one where she had a cheat sheet. She could see — or rather, feel — where the essence was most concentrated and where it wasn't. In other words, where she should strike and survive or strike and die.
'Please work, please work..' She cried in her thoughts. 'Just one swing, it's right there.' She bit the inside of her lip in anxiety.
She swung the unbalanced pickaxe. It wasn't a heavy blow, but it was definitely as precise as she could make it.
Clink.
The pickaxe sank into the node. There was no flare of light, no angry groan. Instead, a clean, perfect shard of Moonlight — the size of a man's forearm — simply detached from the wall and into her waiting hand.
It was cold. So cold it burned her skin, but it felt... alive. The essence within the shard hummed against her palm, a faint song of power.
Asteria stared at the shard. A dangerous thought entered her mind. The overseers told them the glass was poison, that to touch it too long was to turn into glass yourself. But Asteria was hardly a "normal human". She was a vessel for hunger that consumed devils; the heir of a being so desperate to satiate its hunger, it swallowed worlds.
She didn't consume the shard — that would be too obvious, let alone absurd. Instead, she let a tiny, microscopic thread of essence reach into her chest.
She took a "breath" through her soul.
The shard dimmed ever so slightly. The biting cold in her hand transformed into a warm, revitalizing surge of energy from that tiny amount of essence. The fatigue in her muscles eased; the stinging in her lungs from the dust dampened.
'Just that little gave me so much? How I wish to devour all of it instead..' Asteria licked her lips at the thought, the turbulent waters within her soul sea stirred in response to that thought.
By the midpoint of the shift, the other slaves were flagging. The air was thick with the grey dust of the mines, and the constant, high-pitched ringing of pickaxes on glass was driving some to the brink of madness.
Asteria, however was in a trance.
She moved with the mechanical, eerie efficiency of an addict searching for substances.
While the other slaves struggled to secure a single shard — instead securing multiple wounds across their bodies, she had already filled her basket with four. She was careful, though; she purposefully slowed her pace, hitting the wall with "meaningless" strikes whenever the Taskmaster looked her way. She made sure to look exhausted and haggard as the rest.
She was a slave. For now, she would continue digging. But with every shard she pulled from the wall, she felt her Hunger in her soul satiate and grow sharper.
This kingdom was built on light, but its foundations were rooted in a darkness she was uniquely suited to inhabit.