Kael Draven
I woke to screaming.
For a moment, I was disoriented, caught between sleep and waking. Then Lyra jerked beside me, the chain yanking my wrist hard enough to bruise. The screaming continued, raw, terrified, echoing through the cavern.
All around us, slaves were scrambling awake. Lanterns flared to life. And in the flickering light, I saw what was happening.
A man stood in the center of the cavern clawing at his own face. Blood ran between his fingers. His eyes, what I could see of them, were completely black. Not just the pupils. Everything. Like someone had filled them with ink.
"Make it stop," he was screaming, "Make it stop! I can hear them! I can hear them all!"
Two guards ran toward him, but before they could reach him, shadows erupted from the ground beneath his feet. Not normal shadows. These moved wrong, twisted wrong. They wrapped around the man like living things, and where they touched, his skin turned black and cracked like burned paper.
The man's screaming cut off abruptly. He stood there for one more second, shadows writhing around him, and then he fell into a pile of ash that scattered across the stone floor.
Silence. No noise whatsoever.
Then chaos.
Slaves ran in all directions. Guards hollered orders. Viktor materialized from somewhere, his face pale and enraged. "Lock it down! Nobody moves! Nobody leaves!"
But people were already moving, panic overriding sense. A woman near the entrance tried to run. A guard grabbed her. She fought. Someone else pushed the guard. Within seconds, the entire cavern was a mass of bodies and fear.
Lyra pressed back against the wall beside me, her breath coming fast. "What was that? What just happened?"
I didn't answer right away. I stared at the pile of ash, at the remnants of shadow still twisting in the air above it. I knew that magic. I knew it intimately. It was shadow magic, but wrong. Corrupted. Like someone had taken something pure and twisted it until it became poisonous.
This was new. Or, rather, new to this time. I'd never seen shadow magic behave like that in my era.
"Eren." Lyra clutched my arm, her fingers digging into my skin. "What was that?"
"I don't know," I said, which was partly true. I didn't know exactly what had caused it. But I knew what it meant.
There was shadow magic loose in the mine-real, dangerous, uncontrolled shadow magic. And if the Temple found out, they'd kill everyone here just to be safe.
Viktor was bellowing orders, trying to restore control. "Everyone back to your sleeping areas! Now! Anyone still standing in ten seconds gets twenty lashes!
That got people moving. Nobody wanted Viktor's whip. Slaves hurried back to their spots, pressing themselves against walls, trying to be invisible. Lyra and I stayed where we were-we were already against the wall, already out of the way.
The guards formed a perimeter around the ash pile. Viktor approached it carefully, like it might explode. He poked at it with his boot, then jumped back when the shadows flickered. Nothing happened. The shadows faded, and all that remained was gray ash on gray stone.
"Burn it," Viktor ordered. "Burn it all. And someone gets a message to the Temple. We've got a corruption incident."
My blood went cold. If the Temple came, they'd investigate. And if they investigated, they'd find shadowstone in the mine, slaves with potential affinity, maybe even traces of my own connection to the shadows. They'd burn the whole mine. Kill everyone in it.
I'd have to think. I have to really plan. But my mind felt sluggish, still getting used to this body's limitations.
Besides me, Lyra had gone completely still. "Corruption incident," she said in a whisper. "That's what the Temple calls it when shadow magic manifests. They'll send purifiers."
"Purifiers?"
She looked at me like I was stupid. "Where have you been? Purifiers are Temple assassins. They hunt down anyone infected with shadow corruption and execute them. Along with anyone who might have been exposed."
"Everyone in the mine," I said slowly.
"Everyone in the mine," she confirmed.
We stared into each other's eyes. For the first time since we'd been chained, we were of one mind. We had to get out. Not tomorrow, not next week. Tonight.
But escape was impossible. The mine had one entrance, heavily guarded. The tunnels were a maze leading to nothing useful. And even if we got out, we were in the middle of the Ashveil Wastes with no supplies, no weapons, and a chain connecting us.
"There has to be a way," Lyra muttered. She was scanning the cavern again, that calculating look back in her eyes. "Every prison has a weakness. Every system has a flaw."
I was about to tell her she was being optimistic to the point of stupidity when I felt it again. The shadows. They were agitated, disturbed by what had happened. They swirled through the cavern like invisible currents, and I could feel every one of them.
An idea formed. Dangerous, possibly suicidal, but an idea nonetheless.
"I might know a way," I said quietly.
Lyra's eyes snapped to mine. "What?
"Tonight. During the shift change. There is a ten minute window where the guard rotation overlaps at the entrance but leaves the sorting cave understaffed."
"How do you know that?"
"I've been watching." Which was true. I'd been cataloging patterns since I'd arrived. "The sorting cave connects to a ventilation shaft that leads to the surface. It's too small for adults, but." I looked at her thin frame, then down at my own. "We might fit."
"Might." She didn't sound convinced.
"It's better than waiting for the Purifiers."
She chewed her lip, thinking. Then she nodded. "Okay. But we'll need tools to break the chain. And something to deal with the guards in the sorting cave."
"Leave the guards to me."
She raised an eyebrow. "You? You're what, sixteen? Starving? No offense, but you don't look like you could fight your way out of wet cloth."
If only she knew. But I couldn't tell her that. Couldn't tell her that I'd commanded armies, that I'd killed men twice her size without breaking a sweat. That version of me was dead. This version had to be careful.
All I said was, "I'm tougher than I look."
She studied me for a long moment. Then she shrugged. "Fine. We try it your way. But if we die, I'm blaming you."
"Fair enough."
The rest of the day dragged by. Viktor kept everyone working, driving us harder than usual, probably trying to keep order through routine, to get everyone to forget what they'd seen. It didn't work. Fear hung over the cavern like smoke.
People worked mechanically, eyes darting toward the spot where the man had died.
I noticed other things too. Small things. Shadows that lingered too long in corners. Flickers of movement that shouldn't exist. The corruption, whatever it was, hadn't gone away. It was still here, waiting.
And it was getting worse.
By evening, three more were displaying symptoms. Black veins under their skin. Eyes appear darker than they should. One woman muttered continuously to herself in some language I did not understand, her tone deepening, the distortions growing with each utterance.
Viktor had them separated, locked in a storage cave with two guards watching. But I could see the fear on his face. This was beyond his experience, beyond his control.
By the time the shift change finally came, Lyra and I were ready. We'd positioned ourselves near the sorting cave entrance, pretending to work on a crystal vein that ran toward it. The guards changed positions exactly when I'd predicted. The entrance was overloaded with bodies. The sorting cave had only one guard.
"Now," I whispered.
We moved together, the chain forcing coordination. We slipped into the sorting cave like shadows ourselves. The guard was a young man, maybe twenty, more focused on what was happening in the main cavern than on his own post.
I didn't give him time for a reaction. I snatched up a chunk of shadowstone from the nearest table and brought it down against his temple. He went down hard, out cold but alive. Lyra stared at me in shock.
"Tougher than you look," she said, almost admiringly.
"Told you." I was already searching the guard's belt. Found a ring of keys, including one that looked like it might fit our shackles. "Here."
The key worked. The shackles fell away with a click that seemed impossibly loud in the small cave. I rubbed my wrist, the circulation tingling back to life. Lyra did the same.
"The ventilation shaft," she prompted.
I found it in the back corner, exactly where I'd remembered from my observations. It was small, barely two feet wide, and angled upward into darkness. We'd have to crawl, and there was no guarantee it actually led to the surface.
But it was our only chance.
"You first," I said. "I'll follow."
Lyra didn't argue. She snatched a small lantern from the wall and scampered into the shaft. I watched her disappear into the darkness, then turned back to look at the sorting cave.
The shadowstone caught my eye, chunks of it, piles of it, all extracted from the mine walls. Raw, unprocessed shadow magic in physical form. Before my death, a piece this size would have been worth a fortune; now it was just ore, common enough to pile in caves.
On impulse, I grasped three small pieces and shoved them in my pocket. I didn't know why. Instinct, maybe. Or a habit from a life I'd lived a thousand years ago.
Then I climbed into the shaft after Lyra, leaving the unconscious guard and the corrupted mine behind.
The shaft was tight and dark and claustrophobic. I levered myself forward at elbows, the weak muscles screaming in protest. Above, I could hear Lyra doing likewise, the scrape of her body against stone.
We crawled for what felt like hours. My hands bled. My knees bled. Everything hurts. But I kept moving, because stopping meant dying, and I hadn't been given a second life just to die in a ventilation shaft.
Finally, when I thought I couldn't go another foot, I felt cold air on my face. Fresh air. Lyra let out a gasp of relief ahead of me.
"I see it!" she called back. "I see the opening!"
Three more minutes of desperate crawling, and we emerged onto the surface. The shaft opened onto a rocky hillside, hidden behind scrub brush. The sun was setting, painting the Wastes in shades of red and gold. It should have been beautiful.
Instead, it looked like the end of the world.
Lyra hauled herself out and collapsed on to the ground, panting. I followed, my body shaking with every muscle quivering in exhaustion. For some minutes we lay thus, staring up at the sky.
Then Lyra started laughing. Quietly at first, then louder, till she gasped with it. "We did it," she said between laughs. "We actually did it. We escaped."
I didn't laugh. I was too busy feeling the shadows around us, so much stronger here on the surface. They recognized me, welcomed me. And I realized with absolute certainty that everything had changed.
I was free. Weak, hunted, with no resources and no allies except a girl who barely tolerated me. But free.
And freedom, I was remembering, was where empires began.
"Come on," I said, forcing myself to my feet. "We need to move. They'll realize we're gone soon."
Lyra nodded, the laughter dying on her lips. She, too, stood up, wincing at her various injuries. Together we looked out at the Wastes stretching before us.
"Where do we go?" she asked.
I didn't know. But I wasn't about to admit that. "Somewhere they won't find us."
It wasn't much of a plan, but it was a start.
And for the first time since I woke up in this body, I felt something other than pain and confusion.
I felt alive.