The mines of Blackhollow reeked of rust, sweat, and rot.
The stench clung to skin, to breath, to bone itself. It was not a place where men worked. It was a pit where men were ground down until they were less than animals.
Every morning, the overseers cracked their whips like the tolling of a death bell, and every evening, the slaves crawled back to their stone dens coughing up black dust until their lungs rattled like broken flutes. No one left Blackhollow. Those who came in with chains left only as corpses.
Dreven Marr was no different from the rest.
Nineteen years old, yet his body carried the ruin of fifty. His back was bent, his palms split and hard, his arms lean not from strength but from the starvation that gnawed at every rib. His face was gray with dust, his eyes hollow. His name meant nothing here. He was a number, a shovel of flesh, another half-dead boy digging into the earth for a kingdom that had long forgotten his kind.
The others whispered of escape sometimes. They spoke of breaking chains, of scaling the jagged shaft walls, of slipping into the forests beyond the mountains. They whispered of seeing the sun without bars.
But those whispers always ended the same way. Silence.
The silence of broken bodies dragged back through the gates. Silence of the overseers' boots pounding a rhythm over ribs. Silence of ash after a torch was thrown into a hut to punish "traitors."
Dreven never whispered.
He had learned early that hope was more poisonous than the dust that clogged his chest. Hope made men rise. And when men rose, the overseers cut them back down. Better to keep your head bowed. Better to breathe quietly and survive another day.
That was all survival meant here. One more day.
That night, as the lamps burned low and shadows crawled along the jagged stone walls, Dreven swung his pickaxe like he had every night for years. The rhythm was mindless. Steel on stone. Crack. Steel on stone. Crack. His palms had long lost the ability to blister. The pain was constant, a part of him like breath.
He swung again. The pick bit into something strange.
Not stone. Not ore.
Something that… pulsed.
Dreven froze. His knuckles whitened around the haft of the pickaxe. Sweat stung his eyes, rolling down the side of his dust-caked face. For a long moment, he thought his mind was tricking him. That the exhaustion, the hunger, the fumes of the mine had finally eaten through his skull.
But then it came again.
A faint tremor.
Like striking a heartbeat buried in the earth.
His mouth went dry. He chipped away at the wall again, slower this time, careful. Layers of brittle rock flaked away until something black emerged, slick and unnatural against the gray stone.
It wasn't metal. It wasn't stone either.
It was a shard.
Smooth, polished, like glass slicked with oil. It seemed to drink the lamplight, swallowing it, a piece of night itself buried in the bowels of the mine.
The shard throbbed once. Then again.
And a sound slithered into his head.
"…Dreven…"
He stumbled back, slamming against the damp wall. His pickaxe clattered to the ground, the sound swallowed instantly by the mine's endless belly. The other slaves were too far to hear him over their own chains, their own coughing.
The sound wasn't heard. It was inside.
A whisper that seemed to curl through his skull like smoke, brushing against thoughts he had never voiced aloud.
"…do you want to live…?"
Dreven's throat closed. His first thought was madness. The dust had finally eaten his mind. It happened sometimes — men worked too long and began talking to shadows, laughing at walls, before collapsing in a fit of seizures.
But when the shard pulsed again, the thought crumbled.
Madness did not beat like a heart.
Something was calling to him.
He should have left it. Buried it back in stone. Forgotten it.
But his hands moved without command. He reached for it, trembling fingers closing around the shard.
It was cold. Too cold. Like clutching a piece of winter's night. And the instant his skin touched its surface, the whisper sharpened.
"…good… now listen…"
Pain stabbed through his skull. He dropped to his knees with a strangled cry, clutching his head. His vision blurred. He gasped as invisible claws scraped through his thoughts, tearing them open.
Images spilled into him. Not words. Not quite. Impressions.
Blood spilling across black stone.
Chains biting into flesh.
Fire devouring a screaming city.
A crown of broken bones pressed onto a skull.
The voice was not a voice but hundreds layered together, speaking in unison and out of sync, like a thousand mouths whispering through a keyhole.
He screamed. But the mines devoured all sound.
Then, as suddenly as it came, the pain gentled. The claws retracted. The whispers coiled softly now, purring against his mind like serpents.
"…you are nothing here. But you could be more. Take my hand… obey… and I will give you strength."
Dreven's chest heaved. His first instinct was to throw the shard away, to smash it against the rocks until it shattered. This was corruption. Sorcery. The kind of forbidden thing overseers burned slaves alive for.
But the other instinct was stronger.
The instinct of a boy who had lived his whole life beneath a boot.
Strength.
His fingers tightened on the shard. "What do you want in return?" he rasped.
The whispers chuckled. Low. Amused. Endless.
"…only what you already give. Your fear. Your blood. Your chains. Feed me, and I will feed you. That is our bargain."
The overseer's whistle shrieked through the tunnels, echoing sharp against the stone. Chains rattled as the slaves dropped their tools and shuffled into lines. Boots pounded against gravel.
Dreven had been kneeling too long. He hadn't moved in time. They would beat him again. Maybe worse this time.
And then the whisper slid into his ear like a blade between ribs.
"…do you want him to kneel instead…?"
The overseer rounded the corner. His shadow stretched long in the lamplight, whip already coiled in his fist. His lips peeled back when he saw Dreven crouched in the shadows.
"You again, Marr?" His voice was harsh, used to commanding pain. "Always lagging. Always wasting breath. Maybe I should carve the laziness out of your back tonight."
The whisper thundered.
"…say yes…"
Dreven didn't know why he did it.
The word tore from his throat before thought could catch it.
"Yes."
The shard dissolved into his palm like smoke sinking into flesh.
For a heartbeat, nothing.
Then power exploded through him.
His veins lit with shadow. His skin crawled as if something was alive beneath it. His vision sharpened until he could see the sneer twitch at the corner of the overseer's lip, could count the beads of sweat running down the man's temple.
The whisper guided him.
"…strike…"
Dreven moved.
The pickaxe leapt into his hands. It was no longer dull iron but something blackened, edges shimmering with a sheen of night. He swung once.
The overseer's words cut off in a wet gurgle. His eyes bulged, lips stuttering soundless curses as the blade carved through his chest like rotten wood. Blood sprayed, hot and stinging, spattering across Dreven's face.
The man collapsed. Silent.
And Dreven stood above him, chest heaving, pickaxe dripping crimson.
The mine had gone still. No one had seen, but the silence itself screamed.
Dreven stared at the body. He should have felt horror. Terror. Anything.
Instead, he felt alive.
For the first time in nineteen years, the weight on his back lifted.
He wasn't nothing. He wasn't weak.
The whisper purred.
"…good… this is only the beginning…"
His grip trembled, not from weakness but from the thrill burning in his blood. He looked down at the corpse, then at the shadows crawling across his weapon.
"Who are you?" he whispered back.
The voice laughed, deep and endless.
"…I am Murmura… and you… are my vessel."
The rest of the night blurred.
The overseer's body vanished into the shaft, buried in the endless dark. The shard left no mark on his hand, but the whispers remained. Always there. Always hungry.
When the slaves were herded back to their stone dens, Dreven moved with them. But his eyes no longer stared at the ground.
He watched. Listened. The whispers showed him things he had never noticed: how the guards' feet dragged when they were tired, how the third torch on the left wall flickered because the chain there was looser. Cracks in the world, waiting to be split open.
Each possibility came with a whisper.
"…kill him…"
"…take his strength…"
"…no one will stop you now…"
Dreven lay in the dark of his cell, staring at the ceiling while the others groaned in restless sleep. His heart pounded, not with fear, but with something new.
A vow.
He had taken the first step. Blood already stained his hands. There was no going back.
He would never bow again.