Chapter 1: In the Depths of Silence

  "Depression is a sinister thing. It slowly hollows the unaware man from within and leaves naught but a shell behind. It heralds the beginning of an end. When the individual becomes so mentally burdened that they can no longer self-reflect, to lose not only sight of, but capability to rediscover their ultimate purpose, nor bear the weight of its greatness." - Musings of a long dead psychologist 729 CDE

  The mines had stripped him down to bones and silence.

  Four months scraping at the mountain's ribs.

  He moved like a machine now, not a man. 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 had long faded to a droning background noise.

  Above him, the mine's ceiling loomed like a black void 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. The monsters of the deep were just another kind of death. Nothing special.

  The overseers barked orders down the main corridor. Another quota to fill. Another sack of energite 50 nodes or another day without food. Consecutive failure to meet the daily quota earned you the Deep run — a forced trek into the uncharted caverns where the energite nodes were more plentiful, but the mountain itself turned hostile. Few returned. Those who did came back... wrong.

  So he worked with purpose.

  Every swing was measured. He didn’t waste strength—he couldn’t afford to. His eyes scanned for the faint fault lines spidering through the shale. Imperfections. Cracks. He targeted them with practiced precision, his pick sinking in at just the right angle to wedge loose chunks of rock.

  Strike.

  Wedge.

  Twist.

  Lift.

  He worked like a farmer harvesting roots, not a slave cracking stone.

  Others flailed wildly in desperation, exhausting themselves by mid-morning. Dante’s strikes were patient. Tactical. He knew how to shift his weight to soften the blow through his shoulders, how to guide the recoil away from his joints. A trick he’d learned long ago, splitting firewood behind his family’s cottage—back when swinging an axe meant warmth, not survival.

  Sweat stung his eyes. Dust gritted his teeth.

  One more vein. One more node of shimmering blue chipped free and tucked into his worn leather pouch.

  The bell clanged.

  A low groan passed through the line of workers like wind through dying trees. They staggered back from the rock, legs trembling, shoulders aching. Someone coughed hard enough to drop to their knees.

  Meal time.

  The guards barked orders and waved their whips, corralling the miners into a half-collapsed chamber off the main shaft. It was barely lit, the air thick with mildew and mold. The smell of unwashed bodies mingled with blood, rust, and wet stone.

  He sat cross-legged in the dirt.

  A tin bowl was shoved into his hands, filled with a cold grayish slurry. He tested it with a finger—thin, almost watery today. He didn’t ask what it was made of. Some things were better off not knowing.

  He ate without tasting.

  Conversations—if they could be called that—murmured around him in a dozen tired tongues. No laughter. No complaints. Just the quiet scrape of bowls and the occasional mutter of someone checking how much energite they'd bagged so far. No one wanted to fall short. Not again.

  There were always penalties.

  Too soon, the break ended.

  Back to the wall. Back to the mines. The tunnel walls seemed narrower after lunch, the darkness heavier, as if the stone itself resented their return.

  Dante found his mark and resumed the rhythm. Grip. Swing. Chip. Collect.

  Each strike vibrated through his bones like a tolling bell. Hours passed unnoticed. Blood from his palms seeped into the handle of his pick. He didn’t stop. Couldn’t.

  When the recall bell rang again, the sound barely registered.

  He straightened slowly. His body throbbed. Muscles locked and popped with effort. But he was standing. And his sack was full.

  He’d made his quota.

  Today.

  Tomorrow would demand the same. And the day after that.

  But tonight—he’d go without a lashing. Without punishment. Maybe they'd let him sleep the whole five hours.

  Maybe.

  Today he desperately worked to fill his quota. His arms moved beyond exhaustion. His numb legs carried him to vein after vein.

  He hadn’t spoken more than a handful of words in months. There was no reason when every day was the same back breaking work, layer by layer, searching for light within stone.

  Heft. Swing. Chink.

  If he could just get ahead of his quota, he could stockpile a reserve for the harder days—for injuries, for fever, for when his hands bled too much to close around the haft. A few sacks tucked away, hidden behind the loose plank near the water basin, might buy him a reprieve. Maybe a day to rest his screaming joints. Or perhaps he wouldn't have to gamble with his life on a weakening grip or a collapsing tunnel.

  It had become more than mere survival.

  It was a ledger in his head now. A tally of rocks and pain. Debt owed to the mountain, paid in blood and bone. If he could build enough credit, maybe the Deep wouldn’t call his name. Maybe he'd buy a few extra heartbeats before death tapped his shoulder.

  He swung again. The pick struck true, and the glittering tendril of an energite node winked at him from the fracture. He followed it down to the node and chipped it loose, the pulsing veins within the wall snaking from its source died as he tucked it into the leather pouch at his side, and moved on.

  The silence gnawed at him.

  In the beginning, he'd filled it with song. With stories. With laughter and arguments and dreams said aloud. Now, his voice was a stranger in his own throat. He feared using it might break something that couldn’t be fixed.

  Words were too expensive.

  So he hoarded those too.

  Every thought unspoken. Every plea swallowed. Every curse turned inward. He locked them behind clenched teeth and focused on his math. How much time until the next bell? How many strikes per vein? What was the weight of his sack now—six kilos? Seven? Just a bit more, just a little further, just one more handful of light from the dark.

  He had a plan.

  A simple one.

  Survive.

  Survive long enough to be forgotten by the worst of the overseers. Survive long enough to learn the rhythms of the guards, the shifts, the routes. Fade into the background, appear despondent. Survive until someone made a mistake. A key left unattended. A gate left unlatched. An argument loud enough to mask the sound of footfalls.

  He didn’t know what freedom would look like anymore—but he knew it would start with a moment. And when that moment came, he’d be ready.

  He didn’t need hope.

  He needed time.

  So he paid for it in sweat. In silence. In caution. He never took more than he could carry without drawing attention. Never looked a taskmaster in the eye. Never helped another prisoner unless it bought him something—information, positioning, debt.

  He didn’t want to die here.

  But if he had to?

  It wouldn’t be with his face in the dirt.

  Not before he tried.

  Not before he saw the sky one more time.

  A week later, the boy next to him attacked his vein with abandon. the walls of shale above him groaned. He slipped in his backpedaling haste— a thin emaciated figure no older than fourteen — Dante glanced over just as the ceiling gave way.

  A wet crunch.

  The boy was gone.

  Blood seeped into the dirt like spilled ink in the darkness.

  Dante blinked once, twice. Then turned back to the wall and kept working.

  Heft. Swing. Chink.

  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. Under the veil of the dark, he allowed the wetness drip from his eyes, as sleep took him before he felt it coming—like a sudden wave of warmth breaking over cold skin. The steady drip of water, the clatter of tools, the groans of the exhausted—all fell away, and something gentler rose to take its place.

  Leaves rustled above. A breeze danced across his skin. The stink of oil and stone gave way to the sweet musk of wildflowers and manure. The sunlight blinked through a green canopy, warm and dappled. Grass cradled him instead of stone. For a moment, Dante didn't move. He simply breathed.

  "You're late, Sir Dante!"

  A tug on his sleeve. He opened his eyes fully. She stood above him, hands on her hips, barefoot and grinning like she’d just won a battle. Her blonde hair was tangled with morning, her cheeks flushed from running. Brown eyes sparkled beneath a woven twig tiara. A stick crowned with daisies twirled in her hand—her royal scepter.

  "I expected more from you. You were supposed to rescue the kingdom hours ago. My people grow restless." she said, vaguely gesturing to the cattle pasture.

  He smiled. A real one. Not the forced pull of muscle, but something soft and long forgotten. "Then I must be swift, Princess. Or the kingdom of barn shall fall to the goat hordes."

  She giggled.

  From the porch came their father’s voice, rich and gruff:

  “Dante! You feed them cows before they kick the door off the barn again!”

  The girl leapt onto the feed wagon, perched atop the mound of grain and thrust her scepter in the air. "By royal decree, I command thee—fill their troughs and drive back the hunger-beasts!" She pointed to the barnyard with theatrical grace. “Here servant, take this grain!”

  Dante bowed low, brushing the grass with one knee. "As you wish, your majesty. I shall not fail you."

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  She squealed as he grasped the handle of the feed cart and trudged toward the pen, watching the cows press against the rails in anticipation. One lowed, unimpressed. Another stomped its hoof like a general demanding tribute.

  As he poured the grain into the trough, his sister leaped down and danced behind him, tossing handfuls of clover into the air like confetti. "A feast for the realm!" she cried. "Long live the cows!"

  A calf approached curiously, nosing at Dante's elbow. He patted its head, and it blinked up at him with long lashes, content. He turned to look at her again—standing in the sunlight, arms stretched out wide like she could command the world with joy alone.

  She flopped into the grass beside him, crown askew, grinning. "Did you see how brave I was?"

  "You were magnificent," he said, lying back beside her. "Your people must love you."

  She poked his cheek with her scepter. "That's Queen Magnificent, peasant."

  He feigned shock at his demotion, gasping as if wounded. "Forgive me, Your Highness."

  They laughed together. A sound so free, so whole, it almost startled him. He forgot what it felt like to laugh. To be happy.

  Her voice softened as she traced little patterns in the clover. “Do you think the cows like it when we talk to them?”

  “Only if you’re nice,” he said. “You yell too much. The bull is scared of you now.”

  “Good. He tried to lick me yesterday. Gross.” She wrinkled her nose, then leaned closer in a conspiratorial whisper. “I had to tell them all you're secretly a big juicy apple. I hope you understand. We can't have them assaulting royalty like that.”

  Dante rolled his eyes, but he couldn't stop smiling. “Of course you did.”

  They lay there for a while, watching clouds. Hers looked like dragons. His looked like pancakes. Hers were clearly superior.

  “Do you think Papa will let us go into the forest this weekend?” she asked, turning on her side to face him. “I want to find the hidden glade again. The one with the lilies and wild plums.”

  “We can ask,” he said. “If you do the talking, he’ll probably say yes.”

  She lit up. “I’ll even do the dishes tonight.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “Now that I'd like to see.”

  Dante sat up, brushing grass from his shirt. Then to her: “Come on, let’s go.”

  They raced each other back toward the house. Her bare feet thudded on the packed dirt path, and she shrieked with laughter when he let her win.

  She got distracted, kneeling down to pick a new bunch of flowers from the grass.

  The well worn steps creaked as he climbed, sun still warm on his back.

  Dante leaned inside the door. "Pa, cows are fed."

  He remembered the itch of hay on his skin, the golden beams that cut through the slats of the barn roof, the way their father always smelled of pipe smoke and soil. He remembered what peace felt like. What life felt like.

  But then—

  The birdsong faltered.

  The sun stuttered behind dark clouds that hadn’t been there.

  Her laughter—so clear, so high—echoed strangely. Slowed. Warped. Screaming. A spray of red.

  Dante turned in horror. She stood frozen now, one foot on the step, her hand outstretched. Arrows sprouting from her chest as the light faded from her eyes, her small body crumpling to the ground. The trees flickered. The sky dimmed like someone had turned down a lantern wick.

  "Chain this one for the mines." Said a cruel voice. "Women don't last long anyway."

  He reached for her.

  "Sera!"

  Sharp pain blossomed at the back of his head, and he knew no more.

  Dante jolted awake in darkness so complete it felt like a second skin. Nightmares again, echos of the past. The air was thick—grit clung to his tongue and nose, damp and metallic. Somewhere above, a pulley groaned, gears ground together like teeth in a broken jaw. But down here, the silence pressed in like a weight.

  His back ached from where he’d slept on the sharp edges of jagged rock. He could still feel a stripe from the overseer’s whip pulsing along his ribs, a souvenir from collapsing the night before. No one helped you when you fell. The taskmasters "encouraged" you to rise. You either stood back up, or were discarded.

  A hiss of breath escaped his teeth as he sat up, muscles screaming. He reached for his pickaxe. Preparing for the day, long days of work on the farm had taught him to carefully maintain his tools, and work with efficiency. Around him, other miners—emaciated ghosts of men and boys—stirred in the gloom, coughing, groaning, muttering prayers or curses.

  The trudged along to the new site.

  This section of the mine was called the Black Vein. Striations in the rock, thick and ropy like the veins in a mans body. Because that’s what it felt like: like they’d burrowed so far down they’d reached the very heart of the mountain. Lights were rare. Ventilation, a rumor. Sometimes men never came back—not because of a collapse, but because they succumbed to the many other dangers.

  The energite vein was thick here, an ethereal blue pulsing faintly through the seams, a cruel beauty with hard quotas. The guards called it productive. The miners called it cursed.

  Dante stood, legs shaking, and followed the tunnel's curve toward Section D13, the zone he’d been assigned for the week. A narrow passage barely wide enough for two men, lined with rotting timber supports and fungus like wet lace. He ducked under a broken beam, boots slipping on the slick surface.

  Behind, a voice barked. “Hey you!”

  He turned just in time to see the end of a whip snap across his shoulder. Fire lanced down his back.

  “Think I forgot you shorted your load yesterday?” The overseer was a tall, sallow man with sunken cheeks and beady eyes. His grin stretched thin. “You owe me a sack and a half. Unless you want a few ribs cracked for good measure.”

  Dante didn’t answer. He just nodded, jaw clenched, and kept walking. Anything else was bait. The overseers lived for it—an excuse to lash out, to vent their own misery. This was power to them: withholding food, breaking bones, and lashing backs. The usual efforts that make small men feel tall.

  As he reached his work area, he passed a rusted sign barely hanging from a chain: “DANGER: UNSTABLE.” No one paid it attention. They were always unstable. The energite in this section shimmered faintly behind rock like blue fire trapped in crystal, but to reach it, the walls had to be chipped bare, the old supports torn out one by one.

  He set his pick. Grip. Swing. Each strike sent pain up his arms.

  Over and over.

  Time had no meaning here. No clocks. No days. Only quotas. Only pain.

  When his stomach growled, he chewed a strip of old boot leather just to stop it. Failure to met quota meant he hadn’t received full rations in two days.

  By the third hour, his hands bled. By the sixth, his vision blurred. Someone two tunnels over started screaming—an echo that didn’t stop.

  And still the overseers watched.

  And still he swung.

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

  Hunger. Pain. Swing. Collect. Sleep. Return. Hunger. Pain. Swing. Collect. Return....

  Years passed. The cycle continued.

  The mine never slept. Its walls trembled with the groaning weight of stone and steel, of men worked past breaking. The air reeked of damp iron, sweat, blood, and offal. For Dante, this world was all he had known for four long years. He had stopped counting the days after the first year. There was no sunrise here, no seasons. Only the slow rot of time and the steady sting of the overseer's whip. He'd had a plan once, something about survival. Now all that was left was a heartbeat too stubborn to quit.

  He stood at the edge of Section 9, border to the Deep three levels below where even the rats refused to nest. The torchlight here flickered uncertainly, consumed by the blackness pressing in from all sides. Every breath tasted of stone dust. His hands, trembled.

  “Keep moving,” barked a guard. A whip cracked against his back. He staggered forward a drone in truth now. His mind dull and sluggish. Thoughts beyond his grasp, like a dying ember too faint to reveal it's light.

  The pain didn’t register anymore.

  He stopped.

  He coughed. Blood. Swallowing, autonomously.

  “Three-Nineteen,” barked a voice.

  His dull gaze turned automatically. Without urgency. Without thought. The way an old beast turns when its master prods it with a stick.

  The overseer pointed to a new section. A collapsed side tunnel, partially cleared. The others were already setting up braces. A fresh vein had been uncovered.

  He moved toward it, dragging his tools behind him. The handle of his pick had splinters now. One dug into his palm. He didn’t remove it.

  He couldn’t feel it.

  He settled beside the wall and raised his pick. Muscles shifted. Heft. Swing. Impact.

  Stone chipped. Dust swirled.

  He didn't blink.

  Motion. Only motion.

  No thoughts. No memories. No flame in his chest. Just the sound of metal breaking stone and the weight of obligation hanging from his back like another sack he couldn’t drop.

  The strikes blurred together.

  Swing.

  Scrape.

  Haul.

  Repeat.

  A whistle blow, bodies shuffled. He followed them.

  They shoved a tin bowl in his hands. Gruel. Lumps. Cold. Swallowed without chewing.

  Return to the wall.

  Back to the swing.

  To the scrape.

  To the void.

  Others groaned or cried or collapsed.

  The stone was all that remained. His life. His master. His grave.

  And so he worked. Because work was all that was left.

  Because the body remembered, even when the man was gone.

  It happened during a vein run. Section 9B, a newly opened stretch crawling toward the mountain's belly. It was deeper than any of them had gone before. Dangerous. Unstable.

  They sent Dante alone.

  His stomach had been empty for two days. His lips cracked with thirst. The walls here wept oily black liquid, pooling underfoot. Shadows moved without cause, and the air grew thin, sharp. Each breath cut his throat.

  He worked his way down from vein to vein, gradually filling his sack.

  The air thickened as he descended. Heat rose from the lower tunnels like a living thing, clinging to his skin and choking each breath. Dust caked his throat and eyelids. The faint blue glow of energite shimmered in narrow streaks through the rock, barely enough to see by. His pickaxe hung heavier with each swing.

  Vein after vein, he chipped. Collected. Moved on.

  He wasn’t fast. Not anymore. But today, luck had favored him—small, shallow deposits lay exposed like bones beneath flesh. His sack was nearly full. A little more and he’d meet quota. Maybe even earn an extra biscuit from the overseer if he was feeling generous. Or maybe just one less lash tomorrow.

  Just a bit more.

  He crept lower, down past the crude scaffolds and rusted hooks of yesterday’s dig. This was the fringe of assigned territory, the place where the rock curved toward black silence. His boots scuffed across the stone with muted echoes, water dripping somewhere in the distance.

  There. A faint gleam.

  He spotted a thin vein crawling across the wall above a ledge. Not much—but enough. Enough to reach quota. Maybe enough to rest easy tonight.

  But it was dangerous. The ledge jutted over a crevice, narrow and sloped, a line of damp moss clinging to the lip. One bad step and he’d fall. The guards wouldn’t bother searching. No one did. The Deep took its own.

  He hesitated. Glanced back toward the tunnel fork. No one would stop him from turning around.

  But the weight of hunger pressed on his ribs, and the thought of that lash raised again tomorrow tightened his jaw.

  He crept to the ledge.

  Every movement was deliberate. One hand on the rock wall for balance, the other gripping his pick. The blue vein glinted like a promise. A step. A crouch. A swing.

  Crack.

  Stone chipped away, but the sound wasn’t right.

  He struck again—and the pick didn’t bounce. It sank. A dull thunk echoed, unnatural, hollow.

  Confused, Dante froze.

  He pried back the loosened stone with trembling fingers. The surrounding rock crumbled too easily—almost rotted from within. Dust poured out in dry puffs. Behind it, he found not more stone—

  But a surface.

  Smooth. Carved. Angular.

  He wiped at it, revealing lines and ridges. Runes. Not energite veins, not ore. Symbols etched with a precision no miner could have made. They shimmered faintly, humming low under his palm.

  Purposeful. Ordered. Ancient.

  Then the ledge shifted. A groan echoed through the tunnel like the bellow of a dying beast. The floor crumbled beneath his feet. Dante fell, his fingers scraping stone, the light from his lantern spinning wildly as he tumbled.

  He tumbled down, into the bowels of the mountain. Rocks pelted him. His arm wrenched out of socket. Head struck stone. Stars danced in his vision, as it blackened around the edges.

  The last thing he saw before the darkness swallowed him were the weeping black walls of the Deep.

  When he came to, he was pinned beneath a slab of stone. His broken body screamed in agony. His mind didn’t. It simply... waited.

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

  They weren’t going to rescue him. Too much work. There were always more slaves to take his place.

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

  His eyes swelled shut, as he sunk back into unconsciousness.

  Footsteps — softer, measured — approached.

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

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

  Dante cracked his swollen 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.

  "What's he supposed to do with that." Another voice, feminine, grunted. "You aren't some storybook hero, he's broken and concussed. Get him on the stretcher."

  "Introductions are important, Tassa. They set the tone for future interaction," whispered the smooth, cultured voice. "Even in dire circumstances, one must still retain a sense of decorum."

  Rough hands hauled the stone slab off him. A grizzled man — broad-shouldered, a necklace of strange trinkets clinking against his chest — plucked him from the ground like he weighed nothing at all an placed him on the canvas. His face grew closer, and a grimace formed on his visage.

  "Not to say there is no room for urgency."

  Dante's vision swam. In his delirium, his body 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."

  As he fell into oblivion for the second time.

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

  They placed him down by the fire, the heat stinging his frozen skin.

  Tassa swam into his vision a chipped clay bowl and spoon in hand.

  Dante dully gazed forward with a thousand yard stare.

  Something entered his mouth.

  Meat. Roots. Flavor.

  His body mechanically swallowed before sinking back into unconsciousness.

  When he woke again, as he lay near the fire, the woman — Tassa — hummed an old tune.

  One Dante's mother used to sing when the wind and lightning rattled the shutters on stormy nights.

  Dante barely spoke.

  He barely blinked.

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

  Something shifted.

  His breath hitched.

  He closed his eyes.

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