He will seek solace but will find none. He will be a slave first before a master. This is the path to be preserved. — Author unknown.
Some part of him wanted to be chosen. Mild. Quiet. A desire so faint he almost missed it—and yet it burned. He knew the risk in wanting. Knew it was foolish. But whatever the sisters needed had to be better than what waited behind those gates.
They were part of the Church.
How bad could they be?
The thought slowed his steps. Brought a chill to him that the heat could not extinguish. Around him, orange servs drifted in lazy sways, drawn by the anxiety seeping from him. Many more bloomed around the others. He was not alone in this dread, then.
That was something.
Just then.
His legs stopped. Not by choice. His teeth clenched, his body froze as though his legs had turned to stone beneath him. He tried to move. Willed it. Forced it with everything left in him.
It worked. Slowly.
Measured steps. One, then another. An advance. Then nothing.
A chill gripped his heart.
He stared at the uneven ground. The shattered stone beneath his feet. And there, in that stillness, he understood it plainly: he had no strength. Not truly. Fear came for him the same as it came for anyone. He froze like the rest.
Nothing special.
The weight of that settled on his chest like stone. He had to move. The line demanded it. Disruption here meant death, and Merrin knew this well enough.
He just could not make himself move.
The time to ruminate passed before he was ready for it to.
A figure came down the line. An excubitor. The man—if he was one-moved in precise black armor, plates layered over a body bigger than he had ever seen. Black boots ground into the stone with each stride. An obsidian blade resting sheathed at his back, dark and certain. His helmet was a round silver face, reflective, erasing the man within and replacing him with something larger. Something faceless.
Inhuman.
A guardsman of Clan Noctis. House of Night.
"Why have you stopped?"
The voice came stripped of warmth. Chilling, echoing out like a wind flowing through a narrow cave. Merrin swallowed. His hands raising on their own, trembling, unsure whether they wanted mercy or to defend. Words would not come. Only breath. Shallow. Unsteady.
He both shuddered and felt a pull toward the blade. Maybe it was to cut him.
What a thing to feel.
A fist clenched within the black gauntlet. Deliberate. Slow. Merrin's body answered before the awareness grew. He shifted. Feet spread. Wrists angled. The stance of combat. The Ashman within had learned those things. It was like a dance….
The excubitor paused.
Merrin realized it a beat too late. To dance was forbidden. A slave to dance was death. He had committed two crimes in a single breath. If that did not bring an end, nothing would.
He let the stance fall away. Every muscle screaming as he pressed his knees to the scorched ground. Palms followed, the heat of the floor a dull sting against the storm in his mind. His eyes closed. His body shook.
He did not want to die.
And yet.
What a conflict.
The excubitor's gaze found him. He felt it before the pain arrived. The guardsman lifted him by the hair, a surge of fire through his scalp. Merrin groaned. His feet left the ground entirely—held by that grip alone, and a glass face that soon shoved toward his own. In its reflection, he saw himself. Pale. Skin tight over bone. Dark eyes burning with something that seemed alien on his features.
What was that?
A defiant expression.
Is that my face?
He did not recognize it. There was a gap between the face staring back and what he knew to be inside. He wanted death. He had chosen it, had been walking toward it. But that face—it refused. It spat against the idea.
This is not true.
And then, in the space of a breath, he calmed the face. Let it go placid. Defeated. The fight drained from it like water from a cracked waterhusk.
The excubitor seemed pleased by this and tossed Merrin aside.
He hit the wall's base hard. A lamp shattered behind him. Current jolted through, a brief and wild shock, and Merrin tore away from it with a gasp, hands catching the floor, heat biting into his palms. He pulled them back. Knelt there, gritting through it.
More pain to calm pain. How stupid.
Few watched. Those who did wore varied faces from confusion, mockery, to something close to awe. The excubitor wore none of these. Only pride, carried in the set of his shoulders, the deliberate pace of his steps. Glee dressed up rather nicely.
"Stand."
The word broke like something thrown. Merrin shuddered and rose. Against every contradicting instinct, he stood. Hands at his sides. His back still itching where the lamp had kissed it. Who knew the lamps did that? Akin to froststones, almost.
"Move."
He joined the queue. Said nothing. A slave in the truest sense of the word now. He knew it.
He hated how easily it fit.
The gates stood before him soon enough. Giant things. Like mountains pressed into the earth. Their surfaces rippled in slow, uneven waves—Eltium, restless in its dark skin. He looked past them. Into the darkness within. It pulsed. Breathed with a metallic warmth that spewed across his cheeks like a gust.
Tepid.
The Gresendent Sisters watched the line. He watched them watching.
Would they choose him?
He sensed the envy in his thoughts. A sickening heat when his eyes found the slaves already gathered behind the veiled women. Chosen ones. Still. Quiet. Whatever waited for them, it had to be sounder than the mines.
They had it. He didn't.
He slowed in his motions. Some cognitive drift pulling his steps into slow, deliberate, hopeful paces. As if slowing down would invite a glance. A look. Some signal.
The sisters spared him nothing. Not one glance. He might as well have been moving through air.
Merrin frowned. Then sighed, lowering his eyes.
What did I expect?
He was a sinner. He knew this, while they were servants of god. Of course, they knew the taint on him. Of course, they would not choose what god had already rejected. The wanting changed nothing. The hope changed nothing.
It never did.
But hope was like that. He hated it.
The cold moved through him now. Not the cold of froststones. Something else. He looked into the dark of the gate and felt the breath leave him. He knew now. This was an end. Inevitable. Behind it waited terror, pain, and whatever came after. That was his beginning now.
His people had renounced him. The ash and steam had forsaken him.
And now the Almighty had turned his face away.
What remained?
Merrin lowered his eyes, staring at a stray black serv that drifted past him. This was despair.
Mist th—
An impact drove into his back!
Sudden, sending him stumbling forward into the pulsing dark. A guardsman, likely. Impatient with the hesitation. So the only outcome was a cane to the back?
Merrin could almost laugh at the quip while watching as the blackness grew closer to his face….What was to happen now? What was beyond that wall? What was it?
Thus were his frantic thoughts.
Yet, it was light that splashed across his eyes. Revealing, there…A vast cave. In it were people. Countless.
The cave, too….The ceiling jutted downward in jagged points, stone fangs hanging over the men below. High above. Chains drooped between them, clanging. Below, the ground was crude. Craters bloomed across it in spirals, dark and depthless. Unnatural.
Such things could not have been natural…
Casted?
Merrin cringed at the thought. At the ease with which they reached for that power.
Almighty power. Used for pits.
Around those pits, slaves clustered like something smaller than men. Hollow-faced. Iron chains at their waist, the chains dropping them into the deep pits. The excubitors stood at the edges, black-clad, wordless. They did not need to speak. Not when they had power.
Structures pressed into the sloped walls. Platforms perched on stone. The air too smelled of iron and eltium, thick and metallic, settling at the back of his throat like rust.
It itched.
He breathed it in regardless. There was no other air.