The mines of northern Thromium have no seasons.
No sunrise. No sunset. Only shifts.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
The iron bell suspended at the main junction rings out, its flat, brassy sound vibrating through the damp air, bouncing off the jagged walls of black basalt before dying against the mud.
A boy sitting in the dark opens his eyes. His eyelids are rimmed with red, the lashes caked in fine stone dust. He does not sit up immediately. He counts three slow breaths, feeling the dull, persistent ache in his lower back where a timber brace had scraped him yesterday.
Around him, shapes stir in the gloom. Bodies shift on wet straw. A knee pops. Someone groans—a low, thin sound that cuts off instantly, swallowed by the rising murmur of hundreds of breathing lungs.
Wake. Work. Eat. Work. Sleep. Repeat.
Days blur together until nobody remembers whether it has been six months, or two years, or an entire lifetime spent beneath the earth.
Deep beneath the mountains, far beyond the reach of daylight, hundreds of Earthlings swing heavy iron picks against the solid rock face under the yellow, oily glow of flickering lamps. The air is warm, thick, and greasy with the smell of burning tallow and unwashed skin. Dust floats endlessly through the tunnels, suspended like grey mist in the light beams, settling into their throats, their hair, and their eyes with every breath.
A tall boy coughs. It starts as a dry hack in his chest, builds into a racking shudder that bows his thin ribs, and ends with a spat of bright, wet crimson onto the black stone between his feet. He does not stop. He wipes his mouth with the back of a scarred hand, leaves a smear of red across his cheek, and lifts his pick again.
Every cough carries red. Every inhale burns.
Children stand alongside grown men, their shoulders stooped, their chests narrow. Some are fourteen. Some sixteen. Some barely eighteen. Yet every face, shadowed by grime and hollowed by hunger, has already learned the quiet, motionless language of complete exhaustion.
Around their necks, the heavy iron collars cling like frozen hands. The hard metal had rubbed their skin raw months ago, oozing yellow pus until the wounds dried, blackened, and hardened into thick, ridged calluses that form a permanent ridge around their throats. Across their collarbones and over the tops of their arms, wooden carrying yokes have carved smooth, dark grooves into the flesh which has permanent marks carved by tons of iron ore dragged up slick stone inclines.
No one complains anymore.
Complaining wastes breath. Breath is required to swing the iron. Hope wastes even more.
A girl from Osaka pushes an ore cart forward. The wooden wheels, binding on a flat spot on the iron rail, screech with a high, metallic shriek that vibrates through her teeth. She leans her small frame into the heavy pine side, her hips thrown sideways, her bare toes digging into the wet gravel for traction.
Her hands, small and fine-boned, had once practiced piano. They had glided across white ivory keys in a sunlit room in Kansai, playing soft sonatas while her mother cooked rice in the kitchen. Now, her fingertips are split open along the cuticles, black grit packed deep beneath the yellowing skin, the knuckles swollen and thick.
She pushes. Her shoulder presses into the damp wood.
She no longer remembers the soft, rising melody of the last song she had played before the sky tore open over Japan. She cannot recall the key, or the cadence, or the sound of her teacher's voice correcting her posture.
Only the rhythm of iron remains.
Pick. Lift. Push.
Pick. Lift. Push.
A few yards down the tunnel, a boy from Egypt counts every strike of his tool against the wall. His bare chest heaves, his dark skin coated in a slurry of sweat and crushed slate.
Three thousand, one hundred eighty-four.
The iron tip bites into the stone, sending a spray of black chips into his face.
Three thousand, one hundred eighty-five.
He does not count because he enjoys mathematics. He had hated algebra back in Cairo, sitting near the back of the classroom with the window cracked open to let in the noise of the traffic. He counts because the numbers are sharp, orderly, and indisputable.
Three thousand, one hundred eighty-six.
If he stops counting, if he lets his mind drift into the vast, dark silence of the cavern, he fears the cavern will fill his head, and he will stop being himself entirely.
Nearby, a Vietnamese boy quietly repeats multiplication tables beneath his breath. His forehead rests against the icy timber frame of a half-loaded cart, his shoulders trembling in small, rhythmic jerks.
"Seven times six is forty-two..." he whispers, his voice barely a breath against the rough oak plank. "Seven times seven is forty-nine..."
He stops. His lips remain parted, coated in a fine white crust of dried salt.
"Seven times eight..."
He hesitates. His dark eyes fill with tears that run down his dusty cheeks, leaving two clean, pale tracks through the soot.
"...fifty..."
He squeezes his eyes shut, his forehead grinding into the rough wood until the skin breaks. He cannot remember. The number is gone, vanished into the dark grey void that has eaten his hometown, his school uniform, and his sister's name.
He buries his face deep into the sharp, cold ore inside the cart, his hands clutching the iron edges so tightly his fingernails turn white.
He cannot remember.
That sudden, hollow blankness frightens him more than the leather whip hanging from the overseer's belt.
In a narrow side-drift, a girl from France looks upward every morning, her chin lifted toward the jagged ceiling despite knowing there is no sky, no clouds, no blue expanse beyond the solid granite miles above her head.
She has forgotten the exact shape of her mother's nose, the color of her eyes, the sound of her laugh when she called her down for breakfast.
But she still remembers her mother's perfume.
Lavender. Dried flowers kept in small linen sachets inside the linen closet on the third floor of their apartment in Lyon.
Every morning, when the heavy brass bell wakes her from the straw, she closes her eyes and breathes in deeply, searching the damp draft for that tiny, delicate ghost of home.
Every morning, her lungs fill only with the sharp, acidic sting of yellow sulfur and the wet stench of standing water.
A muffled sob rises from the back of the chamber. Someone has dropped their shovel and bowed their head into their knees, their small frame shaking uncontrollably against the rock wall.
No one turns around.
No one stops swinging their pick.
Crying is as common in the deep shifts as the dripping of stagnant water from the ceiling. Everyone eventually cries.
And eventually, everyone stops.
On a raised wooden platform six feet above the muddy tunnel floor, three guards stand leaning against the stout timber railing. Their leather coats are dry and oiled, their brass buttons gleaming faintly in the light of two large, glass-encased oil lanterns mounted to the posts. Heavy leather whips, three yards long and weighted with lead shot braided into the tips, rest casually across their shoulders like sleeping snakes.
One guard stretches his arms, his mouth opening wide in a silent yawn, his jaw cracking in the humid air.
Another lifts a small leather flask to his mouth, tilting his head back to swallow a mouthful of sour red wine. He wipes his lips with the back of his embroidered cuff, his stomach bulging slightly over his silver-buckled belt.
"Three less in every hundred baskets," the third guard says, his voice flat, annoyed, carrying effortlessly over the low, rhythmic thud of the picks. He checks a small brass-bound ledger resting on a wooden music stand. "The ore brought up from Sector Four fell three less in every hundred baskets this week. The Overseer-General will be asking questions before the month is out."The young men and women digging below hear every word.
Nobody answers. Nobody lifts their eyes from the black gravel at their feet.
They are too tired to care about three percent. They are too hungry to feel anger. They are too empty to look up.
Near the center of the rail track, a small boy simply stops moving.
He looks no older than thirteen, his elbows knobby and thin as dry twigs, his collar hanging loosely around a neck that seems too fragile to support his head. His legs do not buckle violently; they simply cease to function, folding beneath him like wet paper.
His body hits the cold, muddy stone with a soft, dull thud. His small wooden bowl, tucked into his belt, rolls out and clatters against the rail.
The guard drinking wine sets his flask down on the railing. He lets out a heavy, irritated sigh.
Not concern. Not alarm.
Annoyance.
It is the exact sound a man makes when he drops an old wooden spoon into the dirt and has to bend over to pick it up.
He steps off the platform, his heavy iron-shod boots squelching loudly in the mud as he descends the short wooden ladder. He walks over to the fallen boy, uncoiling the long leather whip from his shoulder with a smooth, practiced flick of his wrist.
The leather cuts through the air with a high, thin whistle.
CRACK.
The sound explodes inside the enclosed tunnel like a musket shot, echoing down the side-drifts and bouncing off the hard rock face. The whip strikes the boy across his thin, bare shoulder blades, tearing through the thin fabric of his shirt and leaving a bright crimson line across his skin.
The boy twitches, his hands clawing weakly at the wet gravel as he tries to draw his knees under his chest. He pushes himself up two inches, his thin arms trembling wildly, his teeth set in a grimace of pure agony.
He fails, collapsing back onto his stomach.
CRACK.
The second strike hits the exact same spot, tearing the cut open wider.
"I'm... trying..." the boy whispers into the mud, his voice barely audible over the dripping water. "I'm... trying..."
Around him, two hundred prisoners stand frozen in place, their picks held mid-air, their iron shovels dripping wet grit onto their feet.
Nobody moves toward him. Nobody steps out of line.
Not because they do not care. Because moving means joining him under the leather.
The French girl in the side-drift quietly lifts her hands and presses her palms over her ears, shutting her eyes until her lashes ache.
The girl from Osaka stares at the wooden cart in front of her, her knuckles turning grey as she grips the pine edge, her head bowed so low her nose nearly touches the dark ore.
An older teenager standing five feet from the fallen child clenches his hands into tight, rigid fists. He grips his iron shovel handle until his skin turns bloodless, his short fingernails digging so hard into his calloused palms that tiny drops of dark blood ooze between his fingers, dripping onto the wet stone below.
Hatred fills the cavern. It does not burst out in a shout; it fills the space like gas leaking from an underground pocket—thick, invisible, heavy, suffocating.
Powerless.
Buried.
Just like them.
Far above their heads, through two thousand feet of solid granite and ancient mountain stone, something shifts.
At first, nobody in the tunnel notices. Mines often shake. The earth beneath Thromium is old, crossed by deep fault lines and heavy water channels. Stone cracks under the pressure of the mountain's weight. Timbers groan under the load.
Life below continues. The picks fall. The carts roll.
Then... another tremor hits.
This one is different. It does not rattle the loose gravel; it vibrates deep in the marrow of their bones. It is a low, subsonic thrum that vibrates up through the soles of their bare feet, through their ankles, through their spine.
The yellow oil lamps hanging from the timber posts begin to swing violently, casting long, frantic shadows that dance wildly across the rough stone walls.
A shower of fine grey dust drifts down from the ceiling, settling like thin snow onto the shoulders of the guards and prisoners alike.
The guard with the whip stops, his hand frozen mid-air as he looks up toward the dark timbers of the roof. He frowns, his thick eyebrows drawing together over his narrow eyes.
"What was that?" he mutters, his voice lacking its previous casual authority.
Silence fills the cavern. The picks have stopped. The cart wheels have ceased their screeching. The only sound is the heavy, ragged breathing of two hundred exhausted lungs and the fast, frantic dripping of water from the shaken ceiling.
Then...
BOOM.
The mountain does not merely shake; it ruptures.
The sound is not an explosion of gunpowder or the sharp crack of breaking timber. It is the deep, terrifying groan of the planet itself being torn apart from the inside.
At the far end of the main haulage road, the massive entrance portal—framed by three-foot-thick beams of aged mountain oak and secured by heavy iron reinforcement straps—simply disappears beneath a cascading wave of shattered black granite.
The two-ton wooden gates, designed to withstand a siege, burst inward like cheap cardboard toys, turning into thousands of long, jagged splinters that whistle through the air like thrown daggers.
Massive iron hinges, six inches thick, are sheared completely off their stone anchor bolts and fly across the cavern, smashing into a line of empty ore carts with a deafening metallic screech.
A wall of thick, choking grey dust swallows everything, blinding the oil lamps and plunging the cavern into an orange, murky haze illuminated only by the faint, pulsing glow of emergency mana crystals set high in the ceiling arches.
People scream. The sound is shrill, chaotic, stripped of all discipline.
The guards on the platform draw their broadswords, their faces pale beneath the dust, their hands shaking as they fumble with their scabbards.
Another explosion tears through the floor of the main junction.
Not fire. Not smoke.
Earth.
The solid basalt floor of the tunnel ripples like water under a strong wind. Long, dark fissures zip across the stone, swallowing the iron rail tracks like snapping jaws.
Five feet from the main watchtower, massive pillars of raw, jagged granite burst upward through the floor, rising six, eight, ten feet in a fraction of a second. They strike the underside of the wooden platform with the force of battering rams.
The structure folds sideways with a sickening crunch of splitting pine.
The guard on top screams as he is thrown into the dark, his sword clattering off the stone before his body hits the rising pile of rubble. Another platform collapses entirely, its heavy support posts snapped clean at the base, spilling oil lamps, ledgers, and guards into the churning mud below.
Iron chains securing the heavy stone bins snap apart with sharp, whip-like cracks, their links flying through the air like grapeshot. Ore carts tip over, spilling tons of black stone across the tracks.
Nobody understands what is happening. The prisoners huddle together against the side walls, their arms wrapped over their heads, their eyes wide with terror as they watch the solid mountain disintegrate around them.
A guard down in the mud, his leather coat torn, wipes blood from his eyes and stares in horror at the rising stone pillars.
"Earth magic..." he whispers, his voice cracking with hysteria. "Earth magic!"
But Earth Magic in the Duchy is slow, heavy, requiring long rituals, chalk diagrams, and three mages channeling through silver staves to shift a single boulder.
Not like this. Not with this terrifying, effortless force. Not like the mountain itself has suddenly developed a hatred for the men holding the whips.
Then... through the thick, swirling storm of grey dust...
Footsteps.
Slow. Heavy. Utterly confident.
THUD.
THUD.
THUD.
The sound of iron-soled boots striking the broken stone floor rises above the moans of the injured guards and the settling rumble of the cave-in.
A silhouette emerges from the white haze standing in the ruined gateway.
Tall. Broad shoulders set square beneath a heavy coat.
Resting casually across his left shoulder is a massive worker's hammer, its head forged from a single, heavy block of dark iron, its ash-wood handle worn smooth by years of hard labor.
In his right hand, he holds a broad, curved sickle. Its forged steel blade glows with a sharp, faint crimson light, reflecting the pulsing glow of the emergency crystals overhead.
And around his neck...
Around his throat hangs a thick, jagged band of black iron, its surface pitted and rusted, its locking pin sheared off leaving a sharp, open gap over his collarbone.
A slave collar.
Still worn. Still visible against his skin.
He had never removed it. Not because he lacked the tools to cut the metal, but because he refused to let his neck forget the weight.
The dust slowly settles, drifting down through the red-tinted air like falling ash.
The light catches his face.
He looks no older than seventeen. His messy brown hair is stiff with road dust and sweat, sticking out from beneath a faded, ear-flapped ushanka sitting crooked upon his head. He wears simple, heavy peasant trousers tucked into scuffed leather boots, and beneath a patched, rough-spun military overcoat reinforced across the chest with scavenged plates of boiler steel, his frame is lean, hard, and broad.
His eyes are a bright, piercing blue.
He does not look at the cavern with pity. He does not look at the screaming guards with surprise.
Recognition.
His eyes sweep over the rows of stooped shoulders, the raw necks, the wooden yokes, the split fingers holding iron tools. He knows the exact smell of the sulfur hanging in the air. He knows the precise tone of the iron bell that woke them. He knows every scar running down their backs.
He looks at them not as a savior looking down at victims... but as an equal looking across at his own people.
An overseer, crawling out from beneath the shattered timber of the watchtower, manages to push himself to his feet. His face is smeared with black mud and red blood, his left arm hanging limply at his side. With his right hand, he pulls a short steel sword from his belt, his knuckles white with rage and fear.
"You..." the overseer spits, his teeth stained red. "You filthy slave!"
The young man with the ushanka never answers. He does not even look directly at the man's face.
The heavy iron hammer moves.
It is not a complex martial strike; it is the simple, powerful swing of a blacksmith striking an anvil.
CRACK.
The iron head slams into the solid floor three feet in front of the young man's boots.
The granite beneath the overseer's feet erupts upward in a violent, jagged spike of raw stone. The eight-foot pillar of rock punches through the floor like a piston, striking the guard beneath his chin and lifting him six feet into the air before he can even finish his scream.
He disappears beneath half a ton of falling rubble as the pillar settles back into the floor.
Silence drops over the cavern like a stone.
The three remaining guards, standing near the collapsed rail track, freeze instantly. Their swords lower an inch, their eyes wide as they look from the pile of broken rock back to the seventeen-year-old boy standing in the gateway.
The young man finally speaks.
His voice is low, deep, carrying the thick, heavy cadence of the Russian countryside, echoing off the high stone arches with absolute clarity.
"I warned you..."
One of the surviving guards, panicked beyond reason, lets out a shrill yell and charges forward, his sword held straight out before him like a lance.
The young man does not lift his hammer. He steps forward with his left foot, his movement smooth, fluid, unhurried.
The enchanted sickle in his right hand flashes through the air.
Not toward the guard's neck. Not toward his ribs.
Toward the chains.
CLANG.
A single, blinding arc of crimson light cuts through the dim air. Three iron collars, worn by three teenagers standing in the front row, shatter simultaneously into jagged fragments that clatter harmlessly against the stone floor.
The guard's sword passes through empty air as the young man steps inside his reach, catches the guard's throat with his bare left hand, and hurls him sideways into the mud with a single, brutal twist of his arm.
The three teenagers whose collars had been broken collapse onto their knees in the wet gravel.
Their hands instantly fly up to their throats, their fingers trembling as they touch the bare, pale skin where the heavy iron had rested for months.
The weight... was gone.
For the first time since they had been dragged through the violet tears in the sky and brought into the cold darkness of Terre... their necks felt light.
A girl from the group touches the raw, calloused skin beneath her ear where the metal had pinched her flesh every time she turned her head. She draws her hand away, looks at her bare fingertips, and touches her neck again.
She begins sobbing.
Not loudly. Not with the frantic, hysterical screams of the guards.
Quietly. A thin, breathless sound of complete disbelief.
"It's..." Her shoulders shake beneath her torn grey shirt. "It's gone..."
The stranger steps past the groaning guard lying in the mud. He walks slowly through the central junction, his heavy boots crunching on the loose gravel.
He looks around the vast underground chamber. Slowly. Carefully.
He is not counting prisoners. He is not calculating the tactical value of the mine. He is recognizing people.
Every frightened face, every pair of hollow eyes staring out from the soot-blackened gloom reminds him of someone he had known. Someone who had collapsed on the mountain roads. Someone who had starved in the winter barracks. Someone who had never lived to see the sky again.
He stops in front of an overturned wooden supply crate, his eyes dropping for a fraction of a second.
He whispers, almost to himself, his voice barely audible over the settling dust—
"Too many..."
Aleksandr Mikhailovich Volkov climbs onto the overturned crate.
He does not do it with the grand, dramatic flourish of a noble officer stepping onto a parade stage. He steps onto the rough pine planks slowly, his boots setting firmly on the wood, making sure his weight is balanced.
He does not stand there to make himself look tall or imposing. He stands there because in this vast, dark cavern filled with hundreds of terrified, confused children, everyone deserves to see his face clearly.
No polished brass armor. No crimson capes. No noble platforms raised on the backs of slaves.
Just rough pine planks. Just another worker standing on a box.
He reaches up with his right hand, takes hold of his worn ushanka, and removes it from his head. He holds the faded fur cap against his chest, right over his heart, his messy hair falling across his forehead.
He speaks. His voice is not a shout, but it fills the silence of the cave effortlessly, reaching into the farthest side-drifts where miners still cower in the shadows.
"My name..."
"...is Aleksandr Mikhailovich Volkov."