Chapter 17 - Price of Progress

  Elrin clenched his jaw until it ached. His body shook in violent, uncontrollable tremors, but he refused to yield.

  He stared at Tova across from him, vision swimming at the edges, searching for something in the other boy’s face, some sign of approval or recognition, and found none.

  Tova did not look impressed.

  I lasted longer than yesterday and he’s not even impressed?

  “That’s enough,” Tova said.

  Elrin’s eyes widened, the words landing almost too late, and then he let go, his legs collapsing as he dropped out of the sitting position he had been holding for what felt like an eternity. His bones struck the straw-covered floor with a dull, breath-stealing thud.

  “You should be proud,” Tova continued calmly. “That took me years to master.”

  A smile almost reached Elrin’s face, fragile and fleeting, before exhaustion dragged it back down again.

  Tova rose, and opened his palm. A spear flashed into existence there. In a single smooth motion, he turned and drove it into the wall, carving out a thick chunk of stone with brutal ease. The rock tore free and slammed onto the ground in a spray of dust and grit. Then just as it had appeared, the spear disappeared.

  “On your feet,” Tova ordered.

  Elrin fought just to obey, his core trembling as he forced himself upright. He clawed at the jagged wall, fingers scraping raw as he searched for purchase, hauling his weight up inch by inch until he finally stood, swaying but stubbornly unbroken.

  Tova’s gaze dropped to the slab of stone at their feet.

  “Pick it up,” he said.

  Elrin followed his eyes to the rock, his brow furrowing as the size of it truly registered, easily twice his own weight.

  “Pick up this rock?”

  Tova remained still, as though the answer should already be obvious.

  Elrin let out a slow breath, bent down, and shoved the slab to test it, trying to convince himself it only looked heavy. It barely shifted. He straightened and faced Tova again. “I can’t.”

  “You can’t,” Tova repeated, “only until you can. Now pick it up.”

  Elrin decided the quickest way to end this was to show him how impossible it was. He squatted, wrapped his arms around the rock, hands barely reaching across its breadth, and strained upward. His back screamed, the tendons in his legs quivering as if they might tear, and the slab did not lift even a finger’s width from the floor. It felt like his spine would snap long before the stone ever moved. He gave up and staggered to his feet. “See? It’s too heavy for me.”

  “What will you say to your friend when you arrive too late?” Tova asked quietly. “That training proved too difficult for you?”

  “You said you’d train me,” Elrin shot back, anger flaring through exhaustion, “not sit with my back against a wall and lift rocks. I need to learn to fight, to move fast like you, I need combat technique—”

  A flash cut through his words.

  Tova’s spear appeared again, but there was no blade this time, only a blunt end—a staff.

  “Let’s train in combat then,” Tova said, calm as ever, “since you’re so eager.”

  He snapped the staff forward with casual violence, the strike landing beside Elrin with enough force to punch a crater into the wall behind him, stone exploding outward in dust and chips.

  Elrin stared at the crater, eyes wide, then whipped his head back to Tova. “Are you trying to kill me—”

  He never finished.

  The staff was already coming for his face. Elrin jerked his head aside just in time, air hissing past his cheek as the blow missed by a breath. He stumbled, rolled, scrambled across the straw, and looked up in time to see the staff dropping again. He threw himself backward and away, rolling hard until his shoulder struck the far end of the room.

  “Hold on,” he panted, “what is the point of this!?”

  “Dodge,” Tova said, and this time the staff snapped down into Elrin’s knee with ruthless precision.

  Pain exploded through his leg, and the joint shifted wrong with a sickening give.

  Elrin opened his mouth to scream, pain tearing up his throat, but Tova was faster. The blunt end of the staff snapped up and struck his lower jaw, knocking it shut with a sharp crack of teeth. “Quiet.”

  The boy writhed on the ground with his mouth clamped closed, muffled sounds forcing their way out of him as he rolled in the straw, his eyes squeezed shut while the pain roared through his shattered knee.

  “Don’t associate with it,” Tova said sharply. “Let it go.”

  “You cursed—sadist!” Elrin snarled through clenched teeth, fury cutting through the agony. “You broke my knee!”

  “Do not cling to it, Elrin,” Tova snapped back, unyielding. “Let it pass.”

  Elrin lashed out, slapping the staff aside with what strength he could muster, rage finally boiling over. “Enough! Break your own knee and we’ll see how well you take it!”

  “Any guard in this mine could strike that fast,” Tova said coldly. “If you cannot avoid something that obvious, then you are not ready for combat training.”

  “How am I supposed to fight Gunwald without combat training?” Elrin shot back, breath ragged, pain still pulsing through his leg. “How is sitting against a wall and lifting a rock going to do anything?”

  Tova gestured toward Elrin’s dislocated knee. “Your bones give way too easily, your skin splits too easily, and you are slow,” he said plainly. “You are still in a boy’s body, Elrin, weak and fragile.” he said. “You don’t stand a chance against anybody as you are. So we’ll break you. Every day. You’ll sleep, heal stronger, and we’ll break you again. Call it conditioning if you will.”

  Elrin wanted to defend himself, but had no argument against it.

  “The quicker we do it, the quicker we get to combat training,” continued Tova. “Do this, and we’ll begin combat.” Tova crossed the chamber to the heavy slab of stone and squatted beside it with perfect balance, wrapping his arms around the rough surface as though it weighed nothing at all.

  He lifted. The rock rising easily into his hands, and then raised it overhead as if in idle demonstration. He began to squat with it, lowering himself deep and springing back up again, even adding a light hop at the top of each motion, the stone held steady above him as though gravity had simply chosen to ignore him.

  Elrin felt humiliated: all the praise he had earned at Heligsol meant nothing here. In this place, he was back at the beginning, stripped of reputation and rank, no different from a toddler staring up at a grown man performing feats that seemed to defy the very limits of the body.

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  Tova, a boy his own size, could do what Elrin had once believed insurmountable. The sight of it was a reminder that the Bloodkind did not merely push past human limits, they existed beyond them.

  If only I had been born a Bloodkind…the thought flickered through him and he let it dissolve before it could take root. He had wondered before how different life might have been if he and his brother had shared Bloodkind blood, how many doors might have opened, how many horrors might have been avoided, but that kind of imagining was a soft luxury he could not afford anymore. There was no time for what ifs, not down here, not while survival demanded his full attention.

  When Tova was finished, he bent and set the rock back down with care, without so much as a grunt or a change in his breathing. “Strength is only acquired through repeated failure. This is especially the case in your circumstances,” Tova said evenly. “Fail your way to lifting that rock above your head.”

  He turned to leave.

  Then he paused just short of the doorway, as if remembering something trivial, and glanced back. “I forgot.”

  Three pieces of bread arced through the air and landed on Elrin’s lap. “That’s your dinner.”

  Then he was gone.

  Elrin remained where he was, staring down at the bread in his hand as if it had appeared out of nowhere. He did not think as he tore into it and stuffed it into his mouth, eating with desperate speed, crumbs sticking to his lips and face.

  Just as he was about to eat the last piece, he heard a weak meow behind him.

  Lancelot!

  A quiet shame crept over Elrin as he realized he had not thought about the cat that had risked its life for him.

  He bent down beside him and tore what little bread remained into small pieces, offering them slowly, patiently. Cats were not meant to eat bread, and under ordinary circumstances Lancelot might have turned his nose up at it, but hunger dulled preference. Even dry crust felt like a luxury.

  As soon as he finished, exhaustion crashed down on him without warning. His eyelids grew unbearably heavy, his thoughts blurring together, and before he could fight it, his eyes slid shut and he drifted into sleep.

  ***

  Elrin dreamed of the workers.

  He saw them dragged into the light, one by one, Erhart’s hands on them like tools, limbs twisted until joints gave way with wet sounds, bones breaking slowly, until the men could no longer scream and only hoarse, bubbling rasps crawled out of their lungs. Elrin watched it all unfold close enough to see every detail, powerless to interfere and unable to turn away.

  “That’s all because of you,” a voice murmured in his ear.

  Elrin recoiled from it, the words striking harder than the images. He shouted into the formless dark, “Show yourself, Mardukai!”

  “They suffer because of your incompetence,” the voice replied smoothly. “Release me, and I will end them quickly, mercifully, before their final breaths have time to linger.”

  “No,” Elrin shouted, the word tearing out of him in every direction at once. “This body is mine, and you will obey me.”

  A rolling laugh answered him, echoing through the void, harsh and grating, like nails dragged across wood:

  “You have already tasted a fragment of what I am, and somewhere in the deepest hollow of your heart you savored it; the ease of bending others beneath your will, the intoxicating certainty of power unchallenged—”

  “You’re wrong!” shouted Elrin.

  “You deny it, but denial is not absence.”

  A low, patient breath seemed to move through the void around him.

  “It is only a matter of time. You will offer me your body in understanding. The day will come when you stop resisting, and when it does, you will finally grasp what might truly is.”

  Elrin woke with a sharp gasp, his body jerking as if he had fallen from a height. He looked around wildly, but the chamber was empty and bare, just as it had been before. The stone walls loomed in silence.

  Was that really Mardukai?

  The boy wanted to speak to him again, to demand answers, to ask the demon what it truly wanted from him and where this path was meant to end. The questions pressed at the edges of his mind, but within the dream they felt muffled, as though he were trying to shout through water.

  In one corner, Lancelot lay curled and unmoving, his small chest rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm. Elrin crawled over to him and gently stroked the cat’s fur, his touch careful. “We’ll get out of here, Lancelot,” he whispered. “Soon enough. I promise.”

  He pushed himself to his feet and focused. He tested his body, bouncing lightly, squatting low and springing back up again, and despite himself, he felt the difference. His thighs were stronger, his movements cleaner and effortless.

  He hated to admit it, but Tova was right.

  The strength came, but so did the hunger, that unsatisfied, soul-deep void in his chest, coiling tighter now that it had healed him. His thoughts slid, unbidden, back to the blue flames rising from the guards’ bodies, to the way he had drawn them in, how the hunger had vanished then, how whole he had felt afterward.

  Whatever it was, it had helped him.

  He despised that truth and had tried not to think about it since that day, but now, with the hunger returned and the memory of relief still sharp, pushing the thought away grew harder with every waking moment. He had learned there was only one thing that kept it at bay.

  Pain.

  Work that numbed the mind.

  He turned slowly toward the chunk of stone Tova had carved from the wall. Even standing still, he could already feel it, the agony waiting for him, creeping up his spine, settling into his nerves as if his body remembered what was coming. The pain would be brutal, unrelenting, and he would have to earn every fraction of progress.

  Elrin drew a deep breath, bent down, and wrapped his arms around the rock. He shut his eyes, clenched his teeth, and poured everything he had into it, straining until his head went light and his ears burned, until the world narrowed to pressure and will alone. But it did not budge. The stone remained unmoved, as if he were trying to pry a mountain from its roots with nothing but bare hands.

  The boy bit down on his lip and tried again.

  He reset his stance and pulled, harder this time, tendons standing out along his neck, breath snarling in his throat. The slab shook faintly and then settled back into place, unmoved.

  Again.

  This time he did not even bother adjusting his footing. He simply bent and ripped at it, his back rounding dangerously as he forced the effort through sheer grit. His grip slipped, and skin tore from his palms as blood slicked the stone. For a moment he thought the rock had risen.

  It did not.

  He let himself collapse onto his back, breath sawing in and out of his chest as he stared at the ceiling. What am I supposed to do?

  The answer did not come. Instead, images did.

  His brother’s massacre rose unbidden before his eyes, the betrayal, the slaughter, the way he had been offered up like cattle among his own kin. The city of Jotun burning, streets running red. His friend missing, swallowed by chaos. The injustice of the mine pressing down from all sides.

  Something began to rumble inside his chest, not hunger but anger this time.

  “Use it,” grated a voice in his ears.

  Elrin did not force it down, he allowed it to rise.

  His gaze fixed on the rock across from him.

  The boy surged to his feet and wrapped his arms around the slab again, fingers digging into the rough edge. He closed his eyes, and reached for anger, only to find he did not need to reach at all. It was already waiting, hot and immediate, sitting just beneath his skin like a living thing.

  He welcomed it.

  It fed it into his muscles, into his spine, into his shaking legs, pouring every ounce of that wrath into the effort.

  He pulled.

  His fingers felt ready to slip, muscle fibers tearing one by one like ropes drawn too tight, but he did not care. He did not relent. He kept pushing, indifferent to the damage, as if destruction itself was the price he was finally willing to pay.

  Nothing happened.

  Elrin forced his mind back to his brother’s final moments, to the red blade that had pierced him and stolen the breath from his lungs, to the way the world had narrowed to that single, unbearable instant, and he held himself there on purpose, trapping his thoughts in that storm of grief and fury—

  Then something changed.

  A heaviness seeped into him, subtle at first, as though his blood had thickened inside his veins and begun to move slowly. For a brief, flickering instant, he caught sight of it beneath his skin.

  His veins had turned black. And then, impossibly, the rock lifted, just barely, a fraction of an inch off the ground.

  Elrin released it at once and collapsed, clenching his teeth hard to keep the scream trapped inside. Pain detonated along his spine, leaving him rigid and helpless. Any attempt to move sent fresh agony through him.

  He lay there in the straw, chest rising and falling in ragged pulls, staring up at the dim ceiling as dust drifted lazily through the torchlight. The stone had moved, his body had answered him in a way it never had before, but no triumph followed.

  Instead, only a cold understanding.

  For the boy knew now, with painful clarity, what strength truly demanded. If he really wanted to get strong enough to change anything and fast enough for it to matter, then the path before him narrowed to one choice.

  Mardukai.