The bell rang before the sky had finished lightening.
Eryk woke already tired.
His body no longer resisted the cold the way it had the first day. It simply accepted it. He rose, pulled on the same stiff clothes, tied the same cord, fell into the same line of moving shapes without thinking.
Outside, Blackstone breathed smoke.
And beyond its walls, stone answered.
Hala's voice cut through the yard.
"Water first. Then tools. Quarry run."
The word lodged under Eryk's ribs.
Quarry.
He and Bran were given two buckets and a small cart with rattling wooden wheels. Foremen shouted from the slope. Men in chains moved in dark lines down toward the cut in the earth.
No one told them why the water was needed.
They did not have to.
The closer they drew to the lip, the heavier the air became. Dust hung pale in it, visible even in the weak light. Every sound changed as it passed over the open earth. Voices flattened. Picks echoed longer than they should have.
Chains sang.
The quarry yawned open.
It was not a hole.
It was a wound.
Stepped ledges fell away in uneven terraces, each one packed with men, some free, some chained, all bent to the same angle over stone. Iron cranes creaked at the edges. Ropes slid up and down with their loads. The deeper levels were already in shadow though the sun still stood low.
Bran stopped him with a hand on his sleeve.
"Don't lean," he whispered. "Foremen hate climbers."
Eryk nodded.
Below them, a body was being hauled on a sledge along one of the middle tiers. Wrapped in canvas. No haste. No ceremony.
The hammers did not stop.
They delivered water to a line of men hacking at a gray face streaked with darker veins. The foreman there was broad and bald, a leather lash coiled at his belt. He did not look at Eryk.
Men drank without thanks.
Hands were swollen. Knuckles split. One man coughed so deeply it seemed to fold him inward. When he wiped his mouth, the cloth came away dark.
Dust clung to everything, hair, lashes, lips. It filled the lines of faces until men looked carved rather than born.
"How long do they last?" Eryk asked Bran softly as they pulled away.
Bran kept his eyes forward.
"Depends what you mean by they," he said.
On the second run, the cart's wheel caught a buried rock near the descent path.
It tipped.
Water spilled in a bright sheet down the slope and vanished into dust before it reached the bottom.
A foreman's shout cracked across the tier.
"Careless!"
Bran froze.
Eryk moved without thinking. He braced his shoulder to the cart and wrenched it upright. Pain flared where his wrists were still raw beneath fading rope burns. The wheel thudded back into its rut.
The foreman approached, boots grinding stone.
He looked Eryk over with bored contempt.
"Next time," he said, "you go down with it."
He turned away.
Bran exhaled slowly.
"My brother bought his chain like that," he muttered. "On a spill. Didn't even break the bucket."
Eryk's hands shook.
Later, as they moved along the upper tier with tools, a shout rose from below.
Not a scream.
A warning.
Chains snapped tight. Men scrambled back as the wall groaned, deep, slow, like something waking.
Stone tore loose.
It dragged part of the ledge with it. Dust burst upward.
A man vanished into the cloud.
His hammer clattered once.
Then nothing.
The dust took time to settle.
No one ran to the edge.
A foreman barked orders. Chains moved. Picks struck again along the margins.
The hammer remained where it had fallen.
Eryk waited for someone to call a name.
No one did.
"Was that…" he began.
Bran's grip caught his arm.
"Don't," he said.
They moved on.
At midday they brought food, thin broth in heavy buckets. Men lined in silence. Chains rattled softly.
One man lifted his face to drink. Dust had settled so deeply in the lines of his skin that he looked twice his age. His eyes were white-rimmed. His hands shook.
"You new?" he rasped.
Eryk did not answer.
The foreman struck the man across the back with the flat of his lash.
"No talk."
The man bent again to the stone.
On the final run, Eryk saw Jory.
At first he only recognized the place.
Then the posture.
Jory worked near the base of the upper descent, stacking quarried stone for hoisting. One leg dragged. Dust coated him head to toe.
Eryk stopped.
Jory lifted his head.
For a breath they only stared at one another across ten paces of stone.
Recognition struck Jory's face.
Not relief.
Not greeting.
Warning.
The foreman followed his gaze.
"You fetched enough awe for today, yard boy," he said coldly. "Back to your level."
Eryk stepped away at once.
Jory never looked again.
That evening, Blackstone swallowed the quarry's sound as if it had never existed.
The hammering vanished behind walls and smoke and stacked lives.
Eryk sat on his pallet with his hands folded and said nothing.
Bran picked at a crust of bread beside him.
"Tomas worked pump today," Bran said quietly. "They moved someone up."
Eryk nodded.
"Pump's safer," Bran added.
They both knew that only meant less fast.
After a moment Bran said, "You saw it."
"Yes."
Bran said no more.
Long after the shed fell quiet, Eryk lay awake.
He had always thought of stone as something solid. Something that stayed.
The quarry taught him otherwise.
Stone broke.
Stone swallowed.
Stone did not care what names were carved into it.
Far beneath Blackstone, men still worked by torchlight. Still striking. Still coughing dust. Still vanishing between one sound and the next.
Eryk pressed his knuckles against his ribs and breathed carefully.
He had survived fire.
He had survived chains.
Now he had seen what came after.
The world was not made of moments.
It was made of weight.
And the weight had only begun to settle.