Chapter 1: Ashes in the Blood

  The mines had stripped him down to bones and silence.

  Four years scraping at the mountain's ribs, and all Dante Castseed had left was a heartbeat too stubborn to quit.

  He moved like a machine now, not a boy. Swing. Scrape. Haul. Repeat. The rusted pickaxe bit into the wall, showering him with powdery gray dust that clung to his ragged clothes and filled his lungs with every breath. His hands, once quick and clever, were raw and torn, the skin splitting around his knuckles. He didn’t notice anymore. Pain was background noise.

  Above him, the mine's ceiling loomed like a black sky ready to collapse. Somewhere far off, the clatter of stones and the low howl of something alive echoed down the abandoned shafts. Dante barely turned his head. Monsters were just another kind of death. Nothing special.

  The overseers barked orders down the main corridor. Another quota to fill. Another sack of energite dust or another day without food. Failure earned you the Deep Run — a forced trek into the uncharted caverns where the mountain itself turned hostile. Few returned. Those who did came back... wrong.

  Dante didn’t care anymore. His arms moved because they had to. His legs carried him because falling would only earn a boot to the ribs.

  He hadn't dreamed in years. He hadn’t spoken more than a handful of words in longer. There was nothing to say when all the hope had been ground out of you, layer by layer, like ore from stone.

  The boy next to him slipped — a narrow figure no older than fifteen — and the wall of shale above them groaned. Dante glanced sideways just as the ceiling gave way.

  A wet crunch.

  The boy was gone.

  Blood seeped into the dirt like spilled ink.

  Dante blinked once. Then he turned back to the wall and kept swinging.

  That night, he curled into a shallow pit in one of the old tunnels, pulling his threadbare jacket around his shoulders. He listened to the mountain breathing. Stones shifted above. Water dripped somewhere in the dark.

  He hoped, distantly, that he wouldn't wake up.

  The next day blurred into the next. Then the next.

  It ended — or began — during a deep vein run, three levels below where even the rats refused to nest. The walls down here wept oily black moisture. Dante stumbled, weak from missed rations, and his pick struck something hollow.

  The floor under him gave way with a roar.

  Dante tumbled down, down, down, into the bowels of the mountain. Rocks pelted him. His arm twisted wrong. His vision blackened around the edges.

  The last thing he saw before he slipped into unconsciousness was the hole in the cavern wall yawning open like the mouth of some ancient beast.

  When he came to, he was trapped under a slab of stone. His body screamed. His mind didn’t. It simply... waited.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  The guards' voices drifted down from above. Curses. Orders. Then, silence.

  They weren’t going to dig him out. Too much work. Too little energite to justify it.

  So this is how it ends, Dante thought, with a dry, hollow calm.

  He closed his eyes.

  Footsteps — softer, careful — approached.

  Not guards. Not overseers.

  A voice, warm and smooth as a knife sliding into velvet, spoke above him:

  "You're a stubborn one, aren’t you?"

  Dante opened his eyes. A man crouched over him, framed by the faint glow of a covered lantern. His face was smudged with dust, but the way he held himself was wrong for a miner. His clothes, though tattered, carried the ghost of noble tailoring. A threadbare cravat clung stubbornly to his neck. His eyes, sharp and silver-gray, studied Dante like a jeweler examining a flawed gem.

  Another figure moved behind him — a woman with wiry muscles and oil-slicked hands, setting down a battered toolkit.

  The man extended a gloved hand.

  "Come. You’ve forgotten how to live. We’ll remind you."

  Dante stared at the hand like it was a trick. A hallucination. Something impossible in the mines.

  Another voice, rougher, grunted:

  "Lift, kid. Or rot."

  Rough hands hauled the stone off him. A grizzled man — broad-shouldered, a necklace of strange trinkets clinking against his chest — heaved Dante to his feet like he weighed nothing at all.

  Dante swayed. His legs barely held him. He waited for the blows. The shouting. The usual punishment.

  Instead, a woman’s gentle hands — old and calloused — steadied him.

  She smiled, lines crinkling around her eyes.

  "Easy now," she murmured, her voice humming like a forgotten lullaby.

  "You’re safe."

  Safe.

  The word meant nothing.

  They led him through a hidden fissure in the cavern wall, through twisting paths that no overseer knew. At the end: a hollowed-out room, lit with faint blue energite crystals. A stolen sanctuary.

  The smell hit Dante first: warm broth, bitter herbs, something smoky and rich. Food. Real food.

  He sank down by the fire, the heat stinging his frozen skin.

  Someone — a small man with a sharp grin and a permanent chew of something between his teeth — handed him a chipped clay bowl.

  Dante stared into it.

  Meat. Roots. Flavor.

  He almost dropped it. His hands shook that badly.

  The first spoonful made his body remember everything he'd tried to forget: hunger, warmth, life.

  Around him, the strange group talked — softly, carefully. They spoke of things Dante once knew within the meager wisps of long forgotten dreams now: green fields, cities where bells rang at noon, song, and laughter without fear.

  They spoke of home.

  Dante barely spoke.

  He barely blinked.

  But somewhere, deep inside the hollow cavern of his chest, something cracked.

  Something shifted.

  Later, as he lay near the fire, the woman — Tassa, they called her — hummed an old tune.

  One Dante's mother used to sing when the wind rattled the shutters at night.

  His breath hitched.

  He closed his eyes.

  And for the first time in four long years, Dante dreamed of something other than darkness.