The world clawed its way back to Elliot—not through gentle dawn but through the vicious percussion of fists against his ribs. Each blow landed with the dull, meaty thud of hammer on anvil. His mouth tasted of copper and sand.
The Kryll, those vicious middlemen with their patchwork armor and predator grins, relinquished their human cargo with the casual efficiency of butchers trading meat. The true masters arrived in formation: the Veridia Regulars. These weren't the ragged scavengers of the wastes. They stood tall and severe, their bodies sheathed in vacuum-sealed white armor that caught the dying light like polished bone. Green visors reflected nothing, revealed nothing—just the distorted ghost of Elliot's own bloodied face staring back.
Rough hands threw him into a cage of corroded iron bars, its frame groaning with rust and age. The structure lurched forward, dragged by sand-camels whose labored breathing matched the rhythm of Elliot's own fractured gasps. Above, the sun hung bloated and diseased—a sickly orange disk that pressed heat into his skull like a brand. The air shimmered with it, thick enough to choke on.
The journey stretched across cracked earth toward the Aethelian Ruins. What had once been a monument to forgotten kings now rose from the wasteland like a rotted tooth—a sprawling fortress of black, polished stone transformed into a heavily fortified excavation camp. Guard towers jutted from its walls like thorns. Searchlights carved harsh circles through the gathering dusk.
When the cage finally stopped, Elliot stumbled out on legs that barely held. Two men caught him before he collapsed into the dust—John and Ronald, their faces etched with exhaustion and something darker. Recognition flickered. They were from a village near Cindercliff, men who had once traded at the same markets, shared the same wells.
John's grip on Elliot's arm was iron-tight, anchoring him to consciousness. "Listen fast," he rasped, his voice scraped raw. "They're splitting us. Men to The Pit—iron mines up north. Hard labor until we break or die, whichever comes first."
Ronald leaned closer, his breath sour with dehydration. "The women—" He paused, jaw working. "Separated. Sold to Veridia slavers heading south."
The words detonated in Elliot's chest. His mother. Emma. Emily. Their faces flashed behind his eyes—bright, alive, laughing. Now destined for auction houses in the capital, where the wealthy would examine them like livestock. And his father… Ronald's silence spoke volumes. Punishment camps. A death sentence wrapped in bureaucracy.
Elliot's fingers curled into fists until his nails bit crescents into his palms. The pain was good. It kept him present, kept the screaming rage at bay.
They dragged him inside the ancient Throne Room, now gutted and repurposed into a barracks. The walls still bore the faded grandeur of carved murals—winged figures and celestial spheres—but the floor was scarred with tool marks and stained with fluids best left unexamined. The air hung heavy with sweat, fear, and the acrid bite of industrial lubricant.
The work began immediately. Relentless. Merciless. They weren't mining scrap metal or even precious ores. The target was far more vital: rock water. Deep beneath the ruins, where the earth folded into itself like ancient secrets, massive geological formations waited—crystalline water rock, ancient structures of solidified hydration that only the wealthiest in the Veridia Empire could afford. Each chunk was worth more than a human life. Sometimes several.
Elliot's hands blistered within hours, the seismic drill vibrating through his bones until his teeth ached. Around him, other captives swung pickaxes and hauled rubble in silence, their eyes hollow with the knowledge that screaming accomplished nothing.
He found allies in the darkness. Kael, lean as a whip and sharp with mechanical knowledge, could coax temperamental equipment back to life with nothing but wire and instinct. Lira moved like shadow, her observations sharp enough to cut. She noticed patterns in the guards' rotations, weaknesses in the perimeter, moments when attention lapsed.
"We don't run fast," Kael murmured one night, his voice barely audible over the constant drip of condensation from the cavern ceiling. His calloused fingers traced patterns in the dust between them. "We run smart. Find something the Kryll don't understand—something valuable enough to buy our way out."
Elliot said nothing, but his mind churned. His family's forbidden knowledge—the old science, the dangerous understanding of energy signatures and geological resonance—whispered through his thoughts like contraband. He began steering their excavation subtly, reading the stone's response to each drill, each impact. There was something deeper here. Something powerful. An energy signature buried in the ruins' heart that pulsed like a second heartbeat when he pressed his palm to the wall.
Days collapsed into one another, indistinguishable except for the deepening ache in muscles and the slow erosion of hope. Water rations shrank. Men's lips cracked and bled. Some stopped speaking entirely, their eyes fixed on nothing.
The need for action crystallized into desperate clarity.
"We run now," Elliot hissed to John during a brief moment when the guards' attention shifted. His throat felt like crushed glass, each word scraped raw. "Next rock haul. We cause a surge—create chaos in the transfer."
John's eyes, bloodshot and sunken, searched Elliot's face. Then he nodded once. Sharp. Committed.
The plan was madness, but madness was all they had left.
The transfer came at midday, when the heat made thought sluggish and guards lazy. A massive chunk of water rock hung suspended from chains, swaying as the pulley system groaned. Workers swarmed beneath it like ants.
Then a captive collapsed—whether from heat or hunger or simply will draining away, Elliot never knew. But it was enough. The carefully maintained order fractured. Men surged forward, driven mad by thirst and fear and the animal knowledge that death was coming regardless. Better to die fighting than die digging.
Guards shouted. Pulse rifles charged with that distinctive rising whine.
"Go! South!" John roared, his hand a brutal shove between Elliot's shoulder blades that sent him stumbling forward. "Don't stop—"
The first pulse rifle fired. The bolt screamed through superheated air, catching John square in the chest. He dropped without sound, smoke rising from the cauterized wound.
Elliot ran. His legs pumped mechanically, brain disconnected from body. Ronald was beside him, breathing in ragged gasps. Behind them, more rifles discharged—sharp cracks followed by the wet thud of bodies hitting stone.
The courtyard stretched endlessly before them, black polished stone reflecting the carnage like dark water. Elliot's boots slapped against it, each footfall echoing.
Then fire bloomed in his side.
The pulse bolt hit like a sledgehammer wrapped in lightning. His ribs shattered with an audible crack. The world tilted sideways. He was falling, stumbling toward the courtyard's edge where the ancient stone gave way to—
Nothing.
The fissure opened beneath him like a mouth. A massive canyon carved into the earth by forces older than memory. He heard Ronald's voice, sharp and desperate, cut suddenly short. Then the sickening percussion of capture—rifle butts on flesh, the mechanical click of restraints.
Elliot fell.
The darkness swallowed him whole, wind screaming past his ears. His arms windmilled uselessly. The walls of the canyon blurred past—striations of red and black stone, veins of mineral deposits that glittered briefly before vanishing into shadow.
The impact, when it came, was wrong.
Not the bone-shattering collision with rock he'd braced for. Something else. Something massive and smooth and impossibly cold. The air rushed from his lungs in a single explosive gasp. His body crumpled, then slid across a surface as slick as ice.
Water rock. Unmined. A colossal formation that filled the canyon floor like a frozen lake.
Elliot lay motionless, every nerve screaming. His trembling fingers brushed the surface beneath him. It was cold enough to burn, smooth as glass, and beneath his palm he could feel it—that pulse. That energy signature. Stronger here than anywhere above.
The stone hummed with power, ancient and patient and vast beyond comprehension.
Above, distant and fading, he heard the Veridia soldiers securing their victory. Boots on stone. Sharp commands. The sorting of the living from the dead.
But down here, in the darkness and the cold, pressed against a fortune that could buy armies or topple empires, Elliot's consciousness flickered like a dying flame.
His fingers curled against the water rock one final time before darkness claimed him completely.