Asteria looked around the tunnel, and for the first time, she saw it for what it truly was: a slaughterhouse of spirit. It was a hellscape etched with bioluminescence.
Men and women were collapsing in the grey dust, their lungs failing, their bodies giving out under the crushing weight of a quota that cared nothing for the living. The Taskmaster's whip cracked occasionally, a lash of woven light that left searing, cauterized lines across bare backs, but it was a wasted effort. You couldn't whip a corpse into working, and most here were already halfway to the grave.
Her gaze fell on a woman a few meters away. She was older, her hair matted with the fine, abrasive dust until it looked like a wig of tarnished silver. She was hacking – a wet, rattling sound that even the shackle couldn't fully suppress. Every breath seemed to cost her a year of her life. She was struggling to lift a heavy shard into her basket, but her arms were shaking so violently that the glass threatened to slip and shatter, likely triggering a lethal explosion.
Asteria stepped over. Without a word – because the iron at her throat forbade it – she gripped the other side of the basket and helped the woman hoist it.
The woman didn't smile. She didn't whisper a thank you. Instead, she looked up with eyes filled not with gratitude, but with a terrifying, hollow fear. She shrank away from Asteria as if she were a monster.
'Right,' Asteria remembered, the cold logic of the pits settling in. 'In this place, kindness is a sign of surplus energy. And surplus energy means you aren't working hard enough.'
She let go of the basket and returned to her station, the rejection stinging more than the dust in the air.
As she struck the glass again, her [Glass Eyes] caught a disturbance at the edge of the tunnel's dim light. A shadow was approaching, but it lacked the frantic, jerky movement of a Taskmaster.
The pressure in the air changed, turning thick and heavy, like the atmosphere before a catastrophic storm. The bottomless hunger in Asteria's chest didn't just stir; it recoiled. It was the primal instinct of a smaller predator sensing a much, much larger one.
A man stepped into the bioluminescent glow.
He was tall, draped in a long coat of dark, shimmering silk that looked like the midnight sky captured in thread. He didn't wear a mask like the overseers; he had no need for protection. His face was sharp, aristocratic, and pale as bone, framed by hair the color of starlight. But it was his eyes that stopped her heart – a startling, piercing gold that seemed to draw the very essence out of the walls, dimming the Moonlight as he passed.
This was like no Awakened or Master – Ascended – she had ever seen. 'It can't be...?'
The Taskmaster, a man who had spent the last twelve hours acting like a god, instantly dropped to his knees, burying his face in the grey dust.
Asteria didn't kneel. Not yet. She kept her head down, her pickaxe poised against the glass, her heart hammering a frantic, uneven rhythm.
"Lord Valerius!" The Taskmaster exclaimed.
'Lord Valerius,' the name echoed in Asteria's mind.
Valerius didn't look at the quota. He didn't look at the dying slaves. He walked through the tunnel with a slow, deliberate pace, his boots clicking with terrifying precision on the glass floor.
Instead, he stopped directly behind her – Asteria.
Asteria felt the cold radiance of his power. It was like standing in the shadow of a glacier.
"Taskmaster," Valerius's voice was velvet over gravel. It was the first human voice she had heard that wasn't filtered through the distortion of a shackle. It was rich, melodic, and terrifyingly calm.
"Y-yes, My Lord?" the overseer stuttered from the floor, his voice trembling.
"This sector is... messy," Valerius said, tilting his head. He reached out a gloved hand and touched the wall of Moonlight Asteria had been working on. "The veins are fractured. The essence is leaking. It's a miracle the whole tunnel hasn't collapsed into a heap of dust." He scoffed, arrogance lacing his voice.
He turned those golden eyes toward Asteria.
She kept her gaze fixed on the ground, but her [Glass Eyes] remained active. She could see his "Presence." It wasn't a cloud; it was a storm of gold and black needles, radiating out from him in every direction. He was a master of his own soul, a being so far beyond her current state that he might as well have been a deity of the dark.
"And yet," Valerius continued, his voice dropping to a whisper meant only for her. "In the middle of all this structural chaos, I find one worker who strikes with the precision of a master jeweler. One worker who doesn't seem to be breathing the dust. A slave enjoying her work?"
Asteria froze.
'He knows. He's a Saint. He is, there's no doubt. Damnation what do I do here?!'
She waited for the strike – the light-whip, the execution, or the psychic crush. Instead, Valerius leaned in closer. The scent of sandalwood and cold air wafted from his silk coat.
"Do not bother with the fifth shard, girl," he whispered. "I think I have a much more interesting use for a dagger that knows how to hide its edge."
He turned away before she could even look up.
"Taskmaster," he called out, his voice regaining its cold, effortless authority. "Clear this sector. The structural integrity is failing. Send the slaves back to the surface. Except for this one." He pointed a long, slender finger at Asteria.
"She – is coming with me."
Asteria's breath hitched, her face paling. 'Haha, he's kidding. He's kidding, right?'
***
The selection wasn't a choice; it was a kidnapping that might as well have been sanctioned by the crown.
Asteria was marched out of the pits, bypassing the barracks and the filth, toward a vertical transport made of pure, transparent crystal that ran through the heart of the kingdom.
As she stood in the lift, Valerius standing silent and statuesque beside her, she watched the mines fall away. The darkness and the dying slaves disappeared, replaced by the blinding, overwhelming opulence of the Upper City. Aethelgard at its peak was a lie made of light.
The buildings were masterpieces of white glass, flowing like water and frozen in the air. The streets were paved with crushed diamonds that captured the glow of the artificial stars above. People in robes of woven light moved through the plazas, their laughter sounding like wind-chimes in the distance.
Asteria looked at her own hands – blackened, scarred, and filthy. She looked at Valerius, who was staring out at the city with an expression of profound, hidden distaste.
"It is a beautiful cage, isn't it?" he said, not looking at her. "Perfectly clear. Perfectly fragile."
The lift slowed to a halt at the highest level of the Palace. The doors slid open to reveal a hallway of black obsidian glass, lined with statues of faceless kings. Valerius turned to her. He reached out and, with a casual flick of his wrist, the shackle around Asteria's neck simply dissolved into sparks.
Asteria gasped, her hands flying to her throat. She coughed, the first sound she had made in days. It hurt. Her throat felt raw, as if she had swallowed a handful of needles.
"You can speak now, girl," Valerius said. "But I wouldn't recommend it. Not yet. Walls have ears, and in this palace, the walls are made of glass. They hear everything." He said with a slight smile and a grim tone, as if recalling something repulsive.
He gestured for her to follow him down the dark corridor.
"You are no longer a miner, Asteria," he said, using her name with a casualness that chilled her to the bone.
Asteria's heart stopped. She hadn't told anyone her name. Not in this Nightmare. Nobody is supposed to know her name; this is a nightmare created by the Spell!
"I know what you are," he continued, his back still turned to her. "You have a hunger that cannot be satiated. And I? I am a man who has far too much that needs to be consumed."
He continued, his voice sounding more joyful and ecstatic. "And you, are going to make a very fine tool." A grin plastered on his exceedingly handsome face.
He stopped in front of a set of heavy, silver-inlaid doors.
"Welcome to your new life," Valerius said, turning to look at her one last time. "Try not to break anything. Especially me."
"And if I were to ask why you had to clarify?" Asteria mumbled to herself.
Suddenly, he was right in front of her, his head down near her ear, his hand tracing a line along her jaw, finally stopping on her chin; raising her head to look at him in the eyes. "Because you'd die. I'd make sure of that."