Callum Voss was going to die in the dark.
Not a quick death. Not a clean one. The kind that stretched out, minute by agonizing minute, until your lungs forgot what air tasted like and your mind started offering you hallucinations as consolation prizes. The kind where you had time to think about every choice that led you here, crushed beneath three hundred feet of uncaring stone in the deepest shaft of the Blackvein Pits.
Twenty years. Twenty years of existing in this hole, and it was finally going to kill him.
Honestly, that pissed him off more than it should have.
Not the dying part—he'd made peace with that years ago, watching his mother bleed out under a collapsed tunnel while he held her hand and lied that help was coming. Death was always waiting in the mines. A patient predator. You either accepted that truth or went mad pretending otherwise.
No, what pissed him off was the timing.
Three more hours. His shift would've been over in three more hours. He could've died topside, breathing actual air instead of coal dust and his own blood. Could've seen the sky one last time, gray and choked with volcanic ash as it was. Could've died with the memory of open space instead of this—pinned beneath a timber beam in shaft seven, the mountain slowly crushing the life out of him like he was an insect caught under a boot.
"Typical," he muttered.
Then immediately regretted it.
Talking meant breathing deeper. Breathing deeper meant his broken ribs ground together like mill stones. The pain was sharp enough to white out his vision for a second, leaving nothing but a burst of stars against the absolute dark.
Stop being stupid, he thought. I'm wasting the air I have left.
The timber beam across his chest probably weighed as much as three men. His left arm was somewhere beneath the rubble—pulped, most likely, judging by the wet numbness spreading from his shoulder. His right could move maybe six inches in any direction. Not enough to do anything useful. Just enough to claw uselessly at the wood, fingernails bending back, tearing free.
Blood made his palm slick. He'd stopped noticing the pain after the first nail tore off completely.
Small mercies.
The glowstone in his pocket—standard issue for all miners, a tiny piece of luminescent crystal worth more than a month's rations—had died sometime in the last hour. Or maybe three hours. Time got slippery when you were suffocating, when each breath was a battle you were steadily losing.
Now there was just the dark.
Absolute. Hungry. Pressing in from all sides like it had weight and purpose. The kind of darkness that made you forget what light even looked like. The kind that whispered things in your ear, promised things, offered bargains you'd be stupid to accept.
Somewhere distant, water dripped. A metronome counting down to nothing.
The rest of shaft seven had gone silent. Either everyone else was already dead, or they'd been in the western tunnel when the mountain finally decided it was done holding itself up. Lucky bastards, if it had been quick. The Blackvein Consortium didn't waste healing pills on slaves—too expensive, too valuable for people who could be replaced for the cost of a meal and a bed. You either walked out of a collapse or you didn't.
Callum wasn't walking anywhere.
His breath came shallow and ragged, each one a little weaker than the last. The beam creaked with every attempt his lungs made to expand. Something in his chest felt loose—not broken exactly, just... wrong. Like parts that were supposed to stay connected had given up trying. Had accepted defeat before he had.
This is a shit way to die.
Twenty years. He'd given this place twenty years of his life. Breaking his back for people who'd replace him before his corpse went cold. Eating gruel that barely qualified as food. Sleeping on stone that left him aching and cold. Watching friends disappear into the dark, one by one, until he'd learned not to make friends anymore.
Twenty years of being property.
And for what?
He'd tried to escape once. Not physically—that was impossible with the Consortium guards and their cultivation. But through cultivation itself. At fourteen, he'd stolen a manual from a dead overseer's corpse, got drunk on stolen wine, and tried to force a breakthrough. Tried to become something more than a slave with shattered meridians.
The qi had torn through his channels like broken glass dragged through silk.
He'd screamed for three days straight. Three days where every breath felt like dying. Three days where the other slaves had watched him convulse and waited for him to die because that's what you did in the mines—you waited.
He'd survived. The meridians hadn't healed. And Callum had learned his lesson: hope was for people who could afford to be disappointed. Hope was a luxury, like healing pills and freedom and all the other things that would never be his.
Callum couldn't afford shit.
The beam shifted. Just a fraction. Just enough to squeeze another inch of air from his lungs.
His vision swam. The edges started bleeding gray into black.
Well. Guess that's it, then.
His mother's face flickered through his mind, unbidden. The way she'd smiled even in the slave quarters, like pretending hard enough could make the world better. Like hope was a choice instead of a delusion. The way she'd taught him to read by scratching letters in the dirt with her finger, whispering lessons like secrets. The way she'd died—crushed under stone just like this, her last breath spent whispering at him to survive.
"Sorry, Ma," Callum whispered to the dark. "I tried."
The mountain didn't answer. It never did.
The darkness pressed closer, and Callum closed his eyes—not that it made any difference—and waited for the nothing that came after.
The darkness moved.
Not the regular darkness. Not the simple absence of light that came from being three hundred feet underground with a dead glowstone. This was something else. Something that had shape and purpose and presence.
Callum's dying brain tried to make sense of it. Conjured up hallucinations to keep him company in his final moments. His mother had told him once that dying miners sometimes saw angels—beautiful beings of light come to guide them to whatever came after.
This wasn't an angel.
The woman standing three feet away shouldn't have fit in the cramped tunnel. The collapsed rubble, the low ceiling, the debris scattered everywhere—none of it should have left room for someone to simply stand there. But space seemed to bend around her, accommodating her presence like reality itself was making an exception.
Her skin was the color of old ash. Not gray exactly, but that particular shade of something that had burned so completely it had forgotten what it meant to be anything else. Her eyes glowed faintly in the absolute dark—ember-red, like coals that had been burning for so long they'd transcended heat and become something colder.
Midnight-black hair fell past her shoulders like smoke given form. Her robes were tattered things, beautiful once perhaps, before time and whatever had happened to her had reduced them to fragments and memories.
She looked at him the way a merchant might evaluate damaged goods. Calculating. Assessing. Deciding whether he was worth the investment.
"You're dying," she said.
Her voice sounded like stone grinding on stone. Ancient. Tired. Final.
Callum tried to laugh. It came out as a wet wheeze that sent fresh spikes of agony through his chest.
"Really? Hadn't noticed."
Her mouth twitched. It might have been a smile. It might have been something else entirely. Hard to tell with a face that ancient.
"Sarcasm," she said, tilting her head like she was examining him from a different angle. "That's new. Most of them scream. Or beg. Or pray to gods who stopped listening a long time ago." She paused. "You're not even scared."
"I'm terrified," Callum said, and meant it. "Just... also extremely tired."
"Hm."
She crouched, somehow avoiding the debris that should have made the movement impossible. Up close, her eyes were worse. Ancient and exhausted, like she'd watched civilizations rise and fall and found none of them particularly interesting. Like she'd seen everything the world had to offer and concluded it wasn't worth the trouble.
"I'm Morrigan," she said. "The Ashborn Sovereign. And I've been stuck in this gods-forsaken hole for longer than your language has words to describe."
A Sovereign.
One of those god-like cultivators from the stories. The kind that could level mountains with a gesture. Reshape the world with a thought. Live forever, if they wanted.
Definitely hallucinating, Callum thought. My brain's eating itself and this is what it comes up with. Could've been angels. Could've been my mother. Instead, it's a dead god in a hole.
At least it has ambition.
"Nice to meet you," he said, because what else was there to say? "I'm Callum. I'm nobody."
"I can see that." She said it matter-of-factly, not cruel. Just honest. The kind of honesty that came from being old enough to stop pretending. "You're dying in the one spot in all the world that connects to my prison. Bad luck for you. Good luck for me."
The beam creaked again. Callum felt something shift in his chest—something vital, something that had been holding on finally deciding to let go.
"Great," he managed, each word a battle. "Glad my death's convenient for someone."
Morrigan's smile was sharp enough to cut. "I like you. You don't waste time being stupid about it."
She leaned closer, those ancient, ember eyes boring into him like they could see through flesh and bone to the soul beneath.
"I can save you."
The words hung in the air between them.
Three words. Simple. Impossible. True.
Callum stared at her. At this woman who shouldn't exist, offering him something that couldn't be real. His dying brain tried to reject it, tried to dismiss it as delusion, but something deeper—some animal part that still wanted to live—wouldn't let him.
"Why?"
Most people would have lied. Would have dressed it up in pretty words about mercy or compassion or the sanctity of life. Would have pretended this was about him, about his value, about anything other than what it really was.
Morrigan did not lie.
"Because if you die, I'm stuck here another ten thousand years." No hesitation. No pretense. Just brutal, simple honesty. "The conditions are specific. Blood, death, and desperation in very particular proportions. You're the first person to satisfy all three in a very, very long time."
Honesty. How refreshing.
How terrifying.
"What's the catch?" Callum asked.
Her grin widened, showing teeth. "Oh, there's always a catch."
She sat back on her heels, still somehow occupying space that shouldn't exist, and studied him like he was a puzzle she hadn't quite solved.
"I bind my soul to yours. Where you go, I go. If you die, I return here." She paused, letting that sink in. "And those shattered meridians of yours? They can't handle normal cultivation. But death cultivation—consuming the dead to grow stronger—that will work. It's also the kind of thing that gets you killed on sight in most of the world."
Death cultivation.
The forbidden art. The demonic path. The thing that made even criminals spit when they heard about it. The kind of cultivation that meant you ate corpses like a ghoul and carried their deaths with you forever.
Callum thought about Overseer Kaelen, who'd beaten a man to death last week for dropping a cart of ore. About the merchant lords in their floating palaces, living lives of impossible luxury while people like Callum died in holes. About every cultivator who'd ever looked at him like he was dirt. Less than dirt. Property.
He thought about power. About never being powerless again. About the freedom that came from being strong enough that nobody could put you in chains.
He thought about his mother's last words. Survive. Promise me.
"And if I say no?" he asked.
"Then you die here, and I wait for someone else." She shrugged, the gesture somehow carrying the weight of millennia. "Your choice. But make it quick. You're running out of time."
The beam settled another inch. His vision went white, then red, then started fading to black. His lungs burned. His heart hammered. His body screamed for air that wasn't coming.
This is it, Callum thought. Last chance. Die clean or live dirty.
Except there was no such thing as dying clean when you died a slave. No honor in being crushed beneath stone you'd been forced to excavate. No dignity in death when you'd never been allowed any in life.
And spite, Callum had learned, was a powerful motivator.
Fuck it.
"Do it," Callum rasped.
Morrigan's smile went from sharp to predatory. For just a second—just a heartbeat—he saw what she must have been before the imprisonment. Before the exhaustion and the ten thousand years alone. Something vast and terrible and utterly unconcerned with mortal definitions of right and wrong.
Something that burned.
"Hold on," she said. "This is going to hurt."
She wasn't lying.
Power slammed into him like a hammer to the chest.
Cold and ancient and wrong, it tore through his shattered meridians like acid through silk. His broken channels tried to reject it, tried to push back against the intrusion, but Morrigan's will was absolute. Fifteen thousand years of existence had sharpened her to a razor's edge. She forced the connection through, brutal and efficient, and Callum's soul had no choice but to accept.
For one moment—one eternal, devastating moment—the barrier between them fell.
Callum felt everything.
The weight of fifteen thousand years crushed him. Not memories—he couldn't see her past, couldn't grasp the specific details of battles and betrayals and everything she'd lived through. Just the raw, overwhelming emotion. Loneliness that went so deep it had become background noise, as natural as breathing. Exhaustion that made his own tiredness look like a joke. The weariness of someone who'd lived so long that death seemed like a mercy.
And underneath it all, buried so deep he almost missed it: relief.
Finally, something whispered. Not her voice, not his. Something between them. Not alone anymore.
Then the moment shattered, and the real pain began.
Morrigan's power tore through him, forcing the breakthrough. But her ash and fire qi couldn't flow through his shattered channels—they were too broken, too wrong, fundamentally incompatible with what she was trying to do.
Then something else flooded in.
Death qi.
From the tunnels around them, saturated with centuries of mining accidents and cave-ins. From the corpses buried in the deep places where the mountain had claimed its due. From the prison that had held Morrigan for ten thousand years, death-aspected and cold.
His broken meridians drank it in like they'd been starving their entire lives.
Because death didn't flow like normal qi. Death didn't rush or surge or demand. Death seeped. Death crawled. Death found the cracks in things and made them into doorways.
The Flesh Covenant manifested like violence given form.
His bones stopped breaking and started knitting themselves back together. His crushed ribs remembered what straight felt like. His starved muscles, weak from twenty years of malnutrition, suddenly discovered strength they'd never possessed.
Callum Voss screamed.
The sound echoed through shaft seven like a promise. Like a threat. Like the beginning of something that wouldn't end cleanly.
When it finally stopped—when the power settled and the pain faded to a distant, manageable ache—he was still pinned beneath the beam.
But he could breathe.
His chest didn't feel like it was caving in anymore. His ribs weren't grinding themselves to powder with every gasp. And he could feel something moving inside him now. Something cold and gray and hungry.
Death qi.
His death qi.
"Good," Morrigan said. She was standing now, looking down at him with those ancient, knowing eyes. "Now move the beam yourself. You have the strength. Use it."
Callum pushed.
The timber beam that moments ago had weighed as much as the world shifted. Not easily. Not gracefully. But it moved.
He pushed harder, feeling the death qi flow through his arms like cold fire. Feeling strong for the first time in his entire miserable life.
The beam rolled aside with a groan of wood on stone.
Callum dragged himself free.
Every movement sent fresh pain through his battered body. His left arm was broken in at least three places. His ribs screamed. He was covered in cuts and bruises and coal dust and blood.
But he was moving.
He got to his feet. Swayed. Caught himself against the tunnel wall, the rough stone solid beneath his palm.
And stood.
For the first time in twenty years—for the first time in his entire life—Callum Voss was standing on his own power. Not theirs. Not the Consortium's. Not the overseers' or the merchants' or anyone else's.
His.
He looked at his hands. The skin had taken on a faint gray tinge, barely visible in the darkness. Shadows clung to his fingers like they recognized something in him. Something that hadn't been there before.
He looked at Morrigan, this ancient ghost bound to his soul whether he liked it or not.
He looked at the collapsed tunnel, at the mountain that had tried to kill him and failed.
And Callum Voss smiled.
It wasn't a nice smile.
It wasn't a kind smile.
It was the smile of someone who'd just been handed a weapon and was very, very curious about what would happen if he used it.
"Alright," he said quietly. "Let's get out of this shithole."
Morrigan's answering grin matched his own—all teeth and old hunger and the promise of violence to come.
"Now you're talking."