"This world of Adamath, our world, so full of contradictions and beauty, strengths and weaknesses, is a place we all call home. It is a world rich in the lifeforce, only a world filled with wonder can have, a lifeforce we call Ether. Adamath, a world of four continents, each divided by seas so vast, and cultures so old, that to journey across them is to put your life at the mercies of the great hegemons themselves. As much as our world is full of bounties and blessings, it is also capable of great darkness and evil, lurking in the most unsuspecting of places. Most of all, like all evils, it takes root in the places farthest from civilization." — Regent Lucien of the Artificer's Guild

  His earliest memories were of the hole he lived in.

  He, his mother, and his father huddled together against the perpetual cold, pressed close as though the warmth of their bodies alone could hold the world at bay.

  It had always been snowing. White flakes drifting endlessly from a sky he rarely saw, flakes that he and his mother would gather in the wooden buckets his father carved from the flexible timber of the Ugue trees that grew around their little underground settlement, filling them with melted snow to make water during the long, frozen season.

  To call it a hole in the ground was something of an exaggeration, though not by much.

  The truth was simply that they lived underground, far beneath the surface of the world, far from the shimmering, floating cities that dotted the landscape above like jewels suspended in an impossible sky. Those cities felt like myths to him, like something out of a story told to children to make them sleep easier.

  Down here, there were only the tunnels.

  A vast, winding network of interconnecting passages that he and his little sister had explored endlessly when they were young, laughing as their small feet carried them through the dark, hand in hand, fearless the way only children can be.

  Until she died. A brutal, senseless death at the hands of one of the many predators that called their underworld home.

  He had been too young then, and so his mind had done the merciful thing and locked it away, sealing that memory behind walls he had never tried to tear down.

  The trauma of watching his sister torn apart before his very eyes, of being separated from her final, desperate cries only by a sudden cave, in that swallowed the sound and left him with nothing but silence and the phantom echo of her voice.

  He had never forgiven himself. Even at that tender age, he had understood with a clarity that cut deep that he should have protected her. He was the elder of the two. It had been his responsibility.

  He had been weak.

  Even now, as he felt his body being dragged across the dry, sun-baked earth of a land that had taken them months of perilous voyage by sea to reach, he understood that some things had not changed.

  He was still weak.

  He was close to death's door, his body leaking blood it could no longer afford to lose, the old scars carved into his skin screaming alongside the fresh, raw wounds that layered over them like a cruel second script written in pain.

  Tunde.

  That was his name. He had no idea what it meant, and neither had his parents. It was one of those names passed down through the generations like a worn, unreadable inscription on stone, a name that was supposedly an omen, a sign of something grand or terrible. Perhaps both. He had never known which, and right now, he did not have the luxury of caring.

  It did not matter when he was thrown into another hole.

  The irony of it nearly brought a smile to his face, or it would have, had his face been capable of moving. He landed among decaying flesh, which he recognized before he could see it, before his blurring eyes could make sense of the darkness around him. He was familiar with the smell of death. He had grown up beside it.

  As he felt the last of his lifeblood ebbing quietly away, his vision dissolving into formless grey, he wished. He hoped.

  He directed that fading hope at whatever might be listening, though he did not truly know what was out there, or if anything was. He prayed to it anyway, to them, to the earth and the skies, to the very pit he lay dying in, and his prayer was a simple one.

  He hoped he did not come back in some other life.

  He died. He knew he did, the way one knows the moment a fire goes out. There was darkness, vast and total, and within it he felt nothing at all, until he heard the laughter.

  It was brief, and it was terrible.

  A sound filled with power and brutality, with the texture of rage and the edge of pain and beneath it all, something that could only be described as glee. It sounded like secrets. It sounded like power, terrible, immeasurable power, and in the single moment it turned its attention toward him, Tunde felt what it meant to be truly, completely insignificant. He was a single grain of dust caught in the presence of something that could erase the concept of dust itself. An eternity passed in that brief second.

  And then its gaze drew away.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Tunde woke.

  He came back to himself with a violent, wrenching gasp, his chest heaving as though his lungs had forgotten their purpose and were only now remembering it. He was still in the pit.

  The darkness of a night sky, what little of it filtered down from above, blanketed the landscape around him.

  His body was a symphony of agony, every movement pulling a fresh complaint from muscles and bone, though even as he lay there struggling to breathe, he noticed that the pain was slowly, reluctantly beginning to recede.

  He tasted ash on his tongue. His throat was parched and raw. His head pounded with a dull, rhythmic cruelty that made thinking difficult. All of this conspired to pull his attention away from the thing in his fist until it could no longer be ignored.

  His eyes found it slowly. A cube, small and black, with a single line of red light tracing its surface, glowing faintly in the dark.

  It was linked to him through the manacles that had once bound his wrists together, or at least, one half of them. The other manacle had somehow disintegrated entirely, leaving nothing behind.

  But the remaining half, the one still clamped around his wrist and slicked with a coating of his own dried blood, was connected by that same red light to the rotting carcass of a man lying beside him.

  Tunde went very still.

  He lay there, staring into the empty, putrid sockets of a man long dead, dead long enough that his bones had grown brittle and his remaining flesh had darkened to something barely recognizable.

  The head was still attached, held in place by a clump of blackened tissue that looked as though it might give way at any moment.

  He told himself it was the wind that moved it.

  There was no wind in the pit.

  When two pinpricks of pale, cold light bloomed from within those empty sockets, Tunde felt tears slide freely down his face. Not from grief. From a terror so pure it bypassed sound entirely. He was dead, he was certain of it.

  There was no other explanation for this place, for any of this. This pit was his condemnation, his eternity, and the thing blinking awake beside him was his company in it.

  The skeletal form moved slowly, weighed down by the press of hundreds of other dead souls piled around it, but it moved nonetheless.

  One arm lifted, stretching toward him with the patient, deliberate reach of something that had nowhere else to be, and Tunde could not feel his legs, could not feel anything below his waist as his mind began to shut down around the edges.

  The arm hung suspended in the air for a breathless moment.

  Then it came down, not on him, but on his manacle. It struck the metal with surprising force, shattering it, and in the same motion drove itself through his right hand, the one still clutching the cube.

  Tunde's shout of agony was brief and hoarse, dying in his throat almost immediately as the wound, impossibly, inexplicably, stopped bleeding within seconds.

  The cube responded to the fresh blood. It opened with a series of small, deliberate clicking sounds, unfolding like something that had been waiting a very long time.

  Inside it, nestled in its hollow center, was a pebble. Small, unremarkable in shape, but pulsing with a quiet rhythm of black and red light. Tunde watched it, transfixed, as it lifted free of the cube and sank directly into his body.

  Some part of him had been expecting it, perhaps because terror, at a certain pitch, begins to feel like preparation. Even so, when the lance of agony tore through him from the inside, vast and all, consuming, it was nothing his mind could hold on to.

  Mercifully, it let go.

  He woke a second time.

  This time, the light filtering into the pit was pale and grey, the reluctant light of morning. The skeletal figure lay lifeless where it had fallen, surrounded by the hundreds of dead that shared the pit with it.

  Tunde stared at it for a long moment, then at the empty cube now resting in his palm, its surface dull and brown, looking like nothing more than a piece of rusted scrap metal.

  The object alone assured him that what he had experienced had been real.

  The right-hand manacle was still attached to his wrist, which confused him. He had felt it shatter. He had heard it. And yet there it sat, solid as ever, as though it had never been touched.

  The confusion was still settling behind his eyes when he noticed the man.

  He stood at the far edge of the pit, and he had gone perfectly still the moment he saw Tunde looking back at him. A broad, muscular figure, pale-skinned, dressed in the dried leather hide of some animal he could not identify.

  His face was painted in thick lines of black and white, and in one meaty hand he held a large spear, a long shaft of wood capped with a sharpened head of crude metal. In his other hand, dangling loosely, was the arm of a decaying body he had apparently been in the process of collecting when he found Tunde alive among the dead.

  The man stared.

  Tunde stared back.

  Several seconds passed.

  Then the man roared.

  He dropped the corpse and raised his weapon in a single fluid motion, charging with the unceremonious directness of someone accustomed to killing without conversation.

  Tunde threw himself backward, scrambling across the uneven mounds of bodies as the crude spear crashed down into the space where he had just been, tearing through brittle bone and rotten flesh with equal ease.

  The head of the weapon burned with a dim, unstable red energy that Tunde had no name for and no time to consider.

  He rolled down the slope of bodies, trying to get his legs beneath him, and the man came after him without hesitation.

  Tunde raised his right hand instinctively, the manacled one, and screamed. Not a war cry, not anything deliberate. Just the raw, hoarse sound of a man with a parched throat and no other options left, pleading wordlessly with someone who had no intention of stopping.

  The spear came down.

  It struck the manacle.

  The man yelped. Tunde's eyes went wide.

  The metal cuff had lit up, black and red script blazing across its surface in patterns that moved like something alive. More than that, it seemed to drink in the red energy pouring from the spear, drawing it in greedily, and then released it all at once in a single, violent expulsion.

  Tunde squeezed his eyes shut against the force of it.

  When he opened them, the man was on the ground. His own weapon was buried precisely between his eyes, driven there with a force that had left him with a dazed, fading expression on his painted face, as though he had not quite believed it either.

  Blood poured freely into the earth as shouts rang out from somewhere above the pit. Tunde scrambled away, his mind struggling to keep pace with what his body was doing.

  He should be dead; dead men did not kill other men.

  Dead men did not wake up twice in the same pit, clutching strange cubes and deflecting weapons they had never seen before with manacles that should have been shattered. None of this followed any logic he had ever been taught, and he had barely taken three steps when the world caught up with him.

  A weight crashed into him from behind, driving him into the ground and pinning him there as a second man, wearing the same painted face and leather hide as the first, pressed down on him with the full force of his body.

  He barked something sharp and guttural into Tunde's ear, words that shared the shape of the language Tunde knew but were rougher, harder, as though the same tongue had been left out in the elements for too long.

  Tunde opened his mouth.

  Something struck the back of his skull.

  The world went away again.