The mines taught their lessons in blood and silence.
Garrett's first shift began before dawn—a sixteen-hour descent into Pit Fourteen where the air tasted of copper and something older, something that coated the throat and made thoughts swim at the edges. The work was simple in concept: chip ore from the walls, load it into carts, haul it to the surface. Simple, and brutal, and designed to grind human beings into components.
He learned the hierarchy within hours. Veterans claimed the safer positions—cart duty, surface sorting, anything away from the raw veins. New arrivals got the deep work, where the ore pulsed with dim luminescence and whispered in frequencies just below hearing. Three shifts in the deep and you started seeing things. Six shifts and the things started seeing you back.
Garrett saw things on his first shift. Colors bleeding at the corners of his vision. Shadows that moved wrong. A persistent sense of being watched by something that existed just behind his shoulder, patient and curious.
He ignored it. Catalogued it. Added it to his growing model of how this world's physics diverged from his own.
The other new fish weren't adapting as well. Two had to be dragged out before the shift ended—one sobbing, one catatonic. They wouldn't be back. The mine had a simple solution for those who couldn't handle the ore: reassignment to the smelting furnaces, where the refined godite was processed into whatever form the church required. Furnace workers lasted weeks instead of months, but at least they died quietly.
Garrett filed that information alongside everything else. Survival parameters. Operating constraints.
It was on his third day that the body he was wearing became a problem.
He was hauling ore to a collection point when a veteran slave—a massive man with the scarred hands of someone who'd survived years in the deep—grabbed his arm and spun him around. The man's eyes were wide, disbelieving.
"Kael?" The name came out like a wound. "Kael Ashford?"
Garrett kept his expression neutral. "Wrong person."
"No." The man's grip tightened. "I know your face. I buried you. Three years ago, in the Thornveld borderlands. Watched the Crimson Guard cut you down."
Other workers were watching now. Attention he didn't need.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Garrett said calmly. "My name is Garrett Cole. I have no memory of my past."
"That's convenient." The man's voice hardened. "Kael Ashford was a spy. Thornblood agent, infiltrated our unit, got sixteen men killed when he fed our position to the enemy. I saw him die, but bodies disappear from Thornveld battlefields sometimes. The blood-drinkers have ways of bringing people back."
The accusation hung in the air. Around them, the other slaves had gone still—not intervening, but watching with the hungry attention of people whose lives held little entertainment.
Garrett's mind raced through options. Denial wouldn't work; the man was certain. Pleading ignorance had already failed. Violence was possible but would attract overseers. Which left—
"If I was this spy," Garrett said quietly, "and I'd somehow returned from death, why would I be here? In a slave mine? Wouldn't the Thornveld have better uses for their agents?"
The man hesitated. Logic was working, but emotion was stronger.
"Unless this is your cover. Unless you're here to—"
"To what? Spy on ore extraction quotas? Steal the church's secret rock-hauling techniques?" Garrett let contempt sharpen his voice. "I don't know who Kael Ashford was. I woke up in a slaver's cart with no memory of how I got there. If this body belonged to someone else before, that's not my concern. I'm just trying to survive."
The grip on his arm loosened slightly. Doubt crept into the man's eyes.
Then a new voice cut through the tension.
"There a problem here?"
The speaker was a slave Garrett hadn't noticed before—standing at the edge of the gathering, holding a pickaxe with the casual ease of someone who knew how to use it. Shorter than average, wiry, with a face that seemed designed to be forgotten. Most notably: he hadn't spoken a word in the three days Garrett had been in the camp. Everyone called him Rust, and everyone assumed he was mute.
Apparently not.
The veteran released Garrett's arm, suddenly uncertain. "This doesn't concern you."
"Concerns everyone if the overseers come down here wondering why production stopped." Rust's voice was flat, uninflected, the voice of someone who'd stripped emotion from speech the way you'd strip ore from rock. "Demos is in a mood. Burned two surface workers this morning for talking during prayer. You want to explain why you're holding up the line over a dead man's face?"
The veteran looked at Garrett, then at Rust, then at the distant glow of overseer lanterns. The calculation was visible: revenge versus survival.
Survival won. It usually did.
"This isn't over," the man said, but he was already walking away, rejoining the flow of workers like he'd never stopped.
Garrett turned to Rust. "Thank you."
"Don't." Rust's expression didn't change. "I didn't do it for you. I did it because that idiot was going to get us all noticed, and I've spent two years staying invisible." He paused, studying Garrett with unsettling intensity. "But you should know: he's right about the face. I've seen sketches of Kael Ashford. Thornveld spy, caught and executed during the border wars. You're wearing a dead traitor's body."
"I didn't choose it."
"No one chooses what they're given. Only what they do with it." Rust turned to leave, then stopped. "The man who wanted to kill you—his name is Brennan. He lost his brother in the ambush Ashford arranged. He won't forget, and he won't forgive. Sleep light."
Then he was gone, melting back into the flow of workers, and Garrett was left with new information reshaping his understanding.
The body he wore had a history. Enemies. A reputation as a traitor and spy. In a camp full of former soldiers, that reputation was a death sentence waiting to be carried out.
But it was also, potentially, something else.
If Kael Ashford had been a Thornveld agent, he'd been trained. Skilled. Possibly even magically augmented—the Thornblood were said to enhance their operatives. This body might have capabilities Garrett hadn't discovered yet. Resources encoded in muscle memory, reflexes, perhaps even dormant magical potential.
And enemies could be useful. Brennan's hatred was a pressure point, a lever, a variable that could be manipulated. The man would be watching Garrett now, looking for proof of treachery. That attention could be redirected. Exploited. Turned into something productive.
Garrett returned to work, mind churning through possibilities.
That night, in the cramped barracks, he chose his bunk carefully—back to the wall, sight lines to both entrances, within arm's reach of a loose board that could serve as a weapon. Brennan was across the room, watching with undisguised hatred. Rust was somewhere in the shadows, silent again, presence marked only by the occasional glint of reflected light.
Sleep came slowly, and when it did, Garrett dreamed of fire.
Not Demos's fire—something older, deeper, a conflagration that burned at the roots of the world. In the dream, he walked through flames that didn't touch him, toward a figure made of light and heat and terrible patience.
You don't belong here, the figure said. This flesh was promised to us.
I don't care what was promised, Garrett replied. I'm here now.
The figure laughed—a sound like worlds cracking.
Then prove you deserve to stay.
He woke to darkness and the smell of the mines, the dream already fading but leaving something behind: a warmth in his chest that hadn't been there before, a faint pulse that beat in counterpoint to his heart.
The body he'd stolen was waking up.
And whatever had owned it before wasn't happy about the new tenant.
End of Chapter Two