The iron grating above was perhaps twelve feet overhead—a distance that would have been manageable for a healthy adult, but might as well have been a mile for a malnourished child's body that had been worked to the point of death.
Aeon forced himself to think systematically, drawing on his previous life's experience with engineering problems. He needed leverage, support points, and a way to distribute his minimal weight across the unstable pile of corpses beneath him.
The first attempt was a disaster.
He tried to simply climb the walls of the pit, searching for handholds in the rough stone. His fingers, already worn raw from years of mining, couldn't find purchase on the smooth surfaces. Within moments, his grip failed and he tumbled back down into the mass of bodies, landing hard enough to drive what little air remained in his lungs out in a painful wheeze.
Stupid. Think it through.
The bodies themselves would have to serve as his ladder, but they were an unstable foundation that shifted and settled with every movement. Worse, many of the corpses were in advanced stages of decay, threatening to collapse under even his minimal weight.
He began the grueling process of rearranging the dead, searching for the most structurally sound bodies and positioning them to create a crude pyramid. His small hands shook from exhaustion as he dragged corpses that seemed to weigh more than he did, their limbs flopping grotesquely as he maneuvered them into position.
The smell was overwhelming. Putrid flesh, human waste, and the sickly-sweet odor of decomposition filled his nostrils until he had to fight not to vomit. Each time he retched, his already-weakened body convulsed, threatening to send him tumbling back down to the bottom of the pit.
Focus. Engineer the solution. Emotion is inefficiency.
It took what felt like hours to build his macabre staircase. Three times, his carefully arranged structure collapsed when a corpse proved too far gone to support weight. Three times, he had to start over, learning from each failure to identify which bodies were solid enough to serve as foundation stones.
His scarred hands left bloody smears on everything he touched. His legs, thin as twigs and marked with whip scars, trembled constantly from the effort. The iron collar around his neck grew heavier with each movement, the chain attached to it catching on protruding bones and dragging him backward.
Finally, he had something that might work—a pyramid of the most recently deceased, stacked with their strongest bones supporting the structure. The climb would still be treacherous, but it was his only chance.
The ascent was a nightmare of endurance and balance.
Each step had to be placed carefully to avoid crushing through rotted flesh to the unstable mass below. His bare feet, cut and infected from years of walking on sharp stone, provided little grip on the slippery surfaces. More than once, his foot punched through a corpse's torso, sending him scrambling to regain balance as putrid fluids splashed across his legs.
Halfway up, his strength began to fail. His arms, weakened by malnutrition and abuse, started to shake uncontrollably. The chain from his collar had wrapped around a protruding arm bone, pulling him backward toward a fall that would likely break his neck.
Can't stop. Won't stop. I've been discarded once. Never again.
With agonizing slowness, he worked the chain free and continued climbing. His breathing came in ragged gasps that echoed off the pit walls. Black spots danced at the edges of his vision as exhaustion and hunger took their toll.
The final few feet were the worst. The bodies near the top were the most recently thrown, still retaining enough flesh to be slippery but not enough structural integrity to reliably support weight. Twice, his handholds gave way entirely, leaving him dangling by one hand while decomposing tissue squelched between his fingers.
When his bloody fingers finally closed around the iron bars of the grating, he nearly sobbed with relief.
The grating was heavy but not locked—why would it be? Dead slaves posed no threat to anyone. With the last of his strength, Aeon pushed it aside and hauled himself up into the pale light of what appeared to be early dawn.
He lay on the ground beside the pit for several minutes, gasping and shaking, trying to process what he could see of his surroundings.
He was outside the walls of a large camp—not the mining complex where he had labored and died, but something else entirely. High wooden palisades stretched in both directions, topped with iron spikes and patrolled by guards carrying torches. Beyond the walls, he could see the flickering light of numerous fires and hear the sounds of organized activity.
A slave camp. Probably one of the primary staging areas where captured slaves were sorted, broken, and distributed to various work sites throughout the region.
Why am I outside the walls?
The answer came with sickening clarity. The pit of corpses was a disposal site, located outside the camp's defenses to prevent disease from spreading to the living slaves and their overseers. Bodies were thrown out here to rot, far enough away to be forgotten but close enough for convenient disposal.
But being outside the walls presented a problem he hadn't anticipated.
Aeon's memories of this body's experiences made one thing crystal clear—every single one of his captors possessed awakened attributes. Fire, earth, water, wind, lightning—basic elemental powers that made them capable of controlling hundreds of slaves with minimal effort. A child could be incinerated, crushed, drowned, or electrocuted before taking three steps if discovered trying to escape.
That was how a relatively small group of slavers could maintain control over such massive operations. Magic made resistance futile for ordinary humans.
And there were patrols. Even as he lay there recovering, he could hear the measured footsteps of guards walking the perimeter, their torchlight sweeping the area in regular patterns. If they discovered him outside the walls without authorization, they would kill him instantly rather than waste time investigating how a supposedly dead slave had escaped the pit.
I need to get back inside the camp.
The realization was counterintuitive but strategically sound. Outside the walls, he was an obvious escapee who would be killed on sight. Inside the camp, he was just another slave—anonymous, overlooked, invisible in the mass of human misery that filled the compound.
But how to get back inside without being detected?
Aeon forced his exhausted mind to work, drawing on fragmentary memories from this body's time in captivity. The camp had to have infrastructure—kitchens, workshops, medical facilities, and most importantly, waste disposal systems.
Sewers.
Any operation this large would need a way to manage human waste and drainage. And sewer systems, by their very nature, had to connect the inside of the camp to disposal areas outside the walls.
If he could find the outflow point, he might be able to work his way back inside through the sewage system. It would be disgusting, dangerous, and potentially fatal if he got lost in the dark tunnels.
But it was better than being caught outside the walls and executed.
Staying low and moving as quietly as his weakened body allowed, Aeon began searching for the telltale signs of a sewer outlet—the smell of waste, the sound of flowing water, or discolored ground that indicated regular drainage.
His freedom would begin in the depths of human filth, crawling through pipes designed to carry away the refuse of his captors.
It seemed appropriate, somehow. After all, he had already climbed out of a pit full of discarded slaves.
What was a little sewage compared to that?