Vignette - Shade-touched traitors

A short story of Laethelle: The Starlight Age

Written by Ender516

Ghan had a routine. He woke just before First Brightening each day. The shrill piping of the steam whistle in the square below pulled him from sleep and into the rest of his day. He dressed with care, making sure to slide his breeches on the same way he always did - left leg first, then right - before tucking in his long-tailed, stiff-collared shirt and buttoning up his short vest. he padded on stockinged feet down the narrow staircase and into the Spire-facing kitchen, where he stoked the flames in the cook oven and set his kettle to boil on the stove's flat iron surface. In the time it took the water to boil, he had sliced two thick pieces of bread, applied butter and jam in liberal amounts, and set them on a plate on the small kitchen table. He waited for the kettle to boil, waiting for the steam to escape with a shrill whistle that mirrored the larger one in the square. He took his tea weak, only dipping his fine cloth teabag into the water five times in rapid succession. He did not enjoy strong flavours - except for his jam, of course.
Breakfast was a solitary affair. He ate his bread the same way every day, and as he ate he planned. He smoothed his straight brown hair, making sure that the line where it parted was exactly in the middle of his forehead using a tiny mirror he kept on the table near a small vase containing fresh flowers he purchased from a young girl on the street at Last Dimming. Ghan was by all accounts an unremarkable man. Which was the point.
After breakfast, Ghan tidied the kitchen and stepped out into the bustling streets of the Ard, where he had lived for the past three years. Unlike the deep penumbral village of his birth, the Ard - Ardrenost - was a bustling metropolis filled with tens of thousands of people. He lived in a modest home, sandwiched between a cobbler on one side and a midwife on the other. The midwife rarely had patients in her home, preferring instead to visit them. This suited Ghan just fine; he wasn't sure he would be able to take the screams and chaos of childbirth, even if he was hearing it through the walls. Ghan stepped out onto the cobbled stones of the street, moving quickly across to the other side as a slow-moving steam engine chuffed past carrying a load of ore bound for the nearby tradesman's quarter. This time of morning the streets were only lightly populated with other pedestrians, and Ghan had no troubles making his way up the gently curved street. As he walked, he glanced upwards; the buildings in this part of the city were all between two and three stories tall, and they tended to loom somewhat over the streets below. Despite this, the Spire was plainly visible, rising like a great spike high into the clear skies above. It was a truly massive structure, and even after spending so much time living in its proverbial shadow, Ghan was impressed by the artistry of the thing. Its base was nearly half a mile across and it tapered gradually as it climbed to a point more than a thousand feet above him. The Spire's metal was only slightly marred by age and weathering, and from a distance looked like a finely sculpted monument of grey and white. Its apex was lost in the glare of the Spirelight cast by the enormous sphere of blazing light, which was the entire purpose of the structure to begin with; without the Spirelight, the humans of the Ard would have long ago been enslaved by the Masters.
Ghan stopped at a nearby bakery and purchased a local favourite, a delicate, flaky scone finished with a thick shell of caramelized sugar. He crunched into it as he walked towards a nondescript building a bit further up the street, nodding slightly to a small group of workers who, for the past several weeks had been re-cobbling the section of street outside. From the front, the building appeared to house the offices of a barrister and an accounting firm. Ghan liked the idea of he and his comrades working as lawyers, upholding the justice of the Ardenspire. He reached the building's entrance, opened the door, and moved confidently inside.
The interior was dimly lit by a small cluster of sunstones embedded in the ceiling. What looked like gauzy curtains from the outside hid the fact that the building's spire-facing windows had been boarded up and plastered over. No light from the outside could be seen. He and his comrades had chosen this building carefully; beneath its floorboards and the layers of dirt below them flowed a swiftly moving underground river. It wasn't large, but it moved in the right direction, away from the Spire. After several weeks of digging, he and his comrades had been able to break into the galleries and tunnels the river had carved out, where they began the laborious project of widening and stabilizing them until they were large enough to enable a human to walk upright. It was back breaking work, hot and heavy and it left Ghan aching at the end of each shift in the tunnels below. He was not by nature a man given to physical exertion; before taking up with his comrades he had been an engineer attached to one of the city’s growing steam works, where he had spent his days hunched over a drafting table. There, he had been safe and clean, but living a lie. Down here, he was free. He entered a small room and quickly changed out of his street clothes and into sturdily made but grimy work clothes before stepping through a door concealed behind a large cabinet and descending into the earth below.
Their work had gone unnoticed for several months, and in that time, they had accomplished a great deal. The narrow passages and galleries around the river had been widened for some distance away from the Spire, and now that they were cutting through limestone rather than the granite they had encountered at first, their pace had quickened. It was good to be doing work that mattered, that would get him noticed.
“Good to see you hard at work today, Ghan!” A large, ham-fisted man with a vicious-looking burn scar that dominated his face greeted him with a hearty wave. “The harder we go, the sooner we can finish, eh?” Ghan nodded and smiled beneath a layer of sweat. “That will be nice.” In the steam works, it had been hard to make friends. He was often uncomfortable around people, and the workers must have sensed it. They avoided speaking to him; some would even get out of their seats to switch tables if he tried to join them at meals or breaks. After a while, he had simply given up. Yet here making friends had been easy. No one judged him or avoided him. Even men like Havish – men who’d once tormented him as a child – treated him with genuine warmth. He glanced up from where he had been shovelling piles of scree into the river to be carried off. “How far have we come do you think?”
Havish mopped his face with his free hand; in the other he carried a dreadful-looking sledge he was using to break up the rock face nearby. Havish used the sledge against the stones as if they had offended him at some point. “Don’t know, really, but I reckon it’s at least a few miles. Three, maybe four?”
“It doesn’t seem like we’ve been at this all that long.” Ghan grunted as he pushed the last of the scree into the swift-moving waters. “It’s nice to hear that we’ve been progressing so quickly.”
“Aye, and I’ll reckon we’re not the only ones happy about it,” Havish laughed before turning back to the rock. His hammer struck the face with a rhythmic booming, and his shoulders bunched with each heaving blow. Ghan smiled to himself as he watched; maybe the rocks really had done something to him.
“It will be nice to finish,” he said at last in between Havish’s hammer strikes. “I am excited to see the stars again.”
“You and me both,” Havish grunted as he swung.
“Havish,” Ghan began, before pausing. “Did… did you ever tell me why you’re here?” He felt sure that his friend would speak freely with him, but he was uncomfortable; asking questions like this had never earned him any friends in the steam works.
Havish drove his hammer against the rock face one last time, leaving it fractured and unstable as he leaned on his tool and mopped his face once more. Like Ghan, he was dressed in sturdy work clothes and heavy boots. “I don’t believe I did,” he said, a frown creasing his dusty face. He shrugged, “it’s not much of a story, truth be told. I had worked as an apprentice for a smith in Embervale out of Daggerspire until one of my noisy neighbours went snooping in my house and found some… literature. I knew then I had to leave or be branded a heretic, so I came here.”
“Did you have many friends?”
Havish shook his head. “Not really, not like you or the others. I wasn’t really accepted by my neighbours. Even the friendly ones seemed to be afraid of me.” He picked up his hammer again and stepped up to the wall. “Here, my work counts for something. I’m appreciated.” The hammer struck the wall, causing the fractured and broken pieces to tumble to the floor at his feet.
“That’s how I feel too,” Ghan admitted, moving to a new pile of rock where he could put his broom to good use. “I belong here.”
They worked together in the tunnel for the rest of the day, another routine Ghan enjoyed. At the end, they put their tools away, cleaned themselves up using buckets of chilly water drawn from the river, and climbed back up through the hidden door. After saying goodbye to his friends, Ghan stepped back out into the eternal sunshine of the Spire. A nearby clock showed it to be just before Last Dimming. He had been down in the caves a long time. He hurried off, passing the workers once more. He idly wondered how such incompetent people could still count on drawing pay from the city; their work was sloppy and they spent much of their time - from what he could see - frequenting the local shops. He wondered if they were happy here.
He stopped at the bakery on his way home. The woman behind the counter smiled at him - as she always did - and was ready with his usual food, two heavy sausage rolls, and another of the sugar-crusted scones. He stopped again to buy fresh flowers from the young-girl like he did most days. He ate the scone as he walked, finishing it as he reached his front door. Inside, he drew heavy curtains across the kitchen window, plunging his home into darkness. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, red stone. He rubbed it vigorously until it began to glow with a soft red light and placed it on the table before him. The light from the stone fell on the walls and ceiling where it was reflected from countless tiny, glittering flecks of gold and silver. They weren't as beautiful as the stars he ached to see, but they calmed him and for the moment, it was enough.
In the Ard, a person like him was called "shade-touched", and they were viewed as dangerous and mentally unwell. Shade-touched folk, it was said, were driven by a strange compulsion to leave the light of the Spires behind and to wander out into the Dark, where they would become food for the dreaded Watchers - the Thramorri. Foolishness. Ghan knew the truth: those who were shade-touched weren't insane; they were simply responding to something deeper, a hidden truth kept secret in the Illuminated Regions. The truth was that humanity was never meant to stand in the lights of the Spires. They were never meant to deny the Dark or to shut the stars out with the blinding radiance of Spirelight. Humanity was destined to serve the will of the Masters. They were the true lords of the world; they ruled the Dark and all who dwelt there, and humanity was rightfully part of that domain. When humanity's sins had grown too great, when they lost the capacity to discern right from wrong, they summoned the Still and plunged the world into unceasing darkness. The shrouding of the world was divine retribution for humanity's sins, and the Thramorri were the instruments of a divine justice, richly deserved.
Ghan knew that if he and his comrades were discovered, they would be put to death, but their cause was noble. They would carve out a path beyond the outer markers of the deep Penumbra, where thousands of their Masters' human thralls would be waiting. They would lead their cousins through the tunnels and out into the very heart of the Ard. They would pull down the lights of the city and drag the soft, pampered citizens out into the Dark to take their rightful place at the feet of the Masters. Ghan thought briefly about the young flower-girl from earlier; he wondered if the Masters would give her to him as a reward for his loyalty. He didn't have much use for women, but perhaps out in the Dark he could make use of her.
When it was time for bed, Ghan climbed up the narrow staircase to his room. He slipped into bed and spent a short time reading from a slim, leather-bound book, testimonies of comrades who had stepped into the Dark to meet with the Masters and who had brought their wisdom back with them. When he was finished, he extinguished his sunstone and settled back to sleep.
He was awakened by a hand clamping down across his mouth. He fought to sit up, but rough hands pushed him firmly against the bed. He was bound, gagged, and carried out into the street, where he was loaded into a steam carriage and whisked away. He had tried to struggle as they loaded him into the carriage, but one of his assailants cuffed him across the back of the head, and he collapsed into unconsciousness.
At some point, he had been blindfolded. Even after they had stopped moving, and even after they had deposited him in a place that smelled of mould and sewage, the blindfold remained in place. They chained his arms to the ceiling and left him with his toes barely touched the ground; they threw buckets of icy water in his face. Once, as he hung sobbing, a fist drove into his side and he was certain he felt a rib crack. When he asked for food, a dirty hand shoved gobs of cold oatmeal into his mouth. When he was thirsty, other hands tilted his head back and dumped dirty water on his face. It tasted of brine and left his throat raw.
He lost track of time. He was unsure how long he had been there. His mind began to play tricks on him. He heard Havish's voice at one point; he seemed to be singing - or perhaps crying. He drifted in and out of delirium until finally a group of men entered the room and lowered him to the floor. He sagged to his knees as the chains clinked to the floor around him.
"Get up, spawn-lover." The voice was hard, but familiar. When Ghan hesitated, he was picked up roughly and made to stand. "When I tell you to do something, you do it!" A fist drove into his stomach and he collapsed once more. "I said to stand up, spawn-lover!" Hands forced him to stand once more. He bent, trying to catch his breath.
"Who... who are you?" Ghan's voice cracked. Someone reached out and ripped the blindfold from his face. Ghan blinked, then cried out as he saw that he had not been alone in his confinement. Havish's battered corpse twisted slowly nearby; a rag had been wedged into his mouth.
"Look at me, spawn-lover," rough hands gripped his face and turned him to face the voice. It was one of the workers from the street. He and Ghan had nodded to each other each morning for weeks. "We know you," the man grated. "We know what you were trying to do." he jerked his head towards Havish's body. "Your friend there was most helpful."
"Bastards." Ghan cursed them. The workers laughed in his face as his interrogator stepped close, blocking his view of them.
"You consort with Thramorri and shade-touched traitors, and you worked to threaten the lives of the people of this city, and you call us 'bastards'?" The man struck Ghan hard in the face. He tasted blood.
"What do you want from me," Ghan's voice sounded thin and weak.
"Nothing at all," the man replied. "Your friend told us what we needed." He glanced over at the bloodied corpse as it twisted slowly in its shackles. "We thought he'd last a while but he was weaker than you, hard as that was for us to believe." The man walked in a slow circle around Ghan, his hand trailing across his torso. "We found your tunnels easily enough," he continued. "We collapsed them all. Most of your friends were in there when the ceilings came down. It's a shame, really."
Ghan began to weep as he thought of his friends buried beneath several tons of stone and earth. The men around him laughed at his tears. "Don't grieve too much, my friend," the man said, patting Ghan lightly on the back. "We've decided to return you to your masters."
"I... I'll get to see the stars?" Ghan whispered.
"We'll make sure of it."
They left him out beyond the furthest marker in the deep Penumbra. They drove stakes through his wrists and tied his ankles to a rope which they stretched taut and pinned to the ground. He screamed the entire time. When they were done, they fitted his head with a barbed circlet that dug into his skull and featured long thin hooks that they used to pull back his eyelids. Then they abandoned him, for death or the Watchers, which ever found him first. He screamed until his voice grew hoarse, but no one ever found him. He screamed and wept beneath a veil of stars whose cold light shone down uncaring as he cursed his luck and prayed for the Masters to save him. He did not last much longer laying there, his blood soaking into the dead earth beneath him. His last thoughts were of the flower-girl in the street. She seemed to be laughing at him.