Cold clung to the stone walls like mold, creeping into Lugal's bones until his shivers felt like seizures. The damp in the cell didn't just touch his skin—it sank into him, made a home inside his chest. Each breath came shallow, not from the chill, but from the weight that pressed down harder than iron bars ever could.
A nobleman's laughter still echoed in his ears—silken, lazy, almost bored. That flick of a ring-heavy hand, dismissing him like he was a speck on polished boots.
"Ballast."
Not a man. Not a person. Just weight to be discarded.
He'd bled for the Forum. Run their errands through alleyways where knives whispered louder than words. Blackmail, sabotage, silence-for-hire. Secrets traded like coin, morality peeled off layer by layer like rotting skin. Every step calculated. Every betrayal justified. And yet—he was here. In the dark. Forgotten.
A crooked smile twitched across his face. The kind you wear when laughter would snap your ribs.
He turned, cheek pressing against cold stone, and listened.
Drip. Drip. Drip. A single leak wept endlessly somewhere in the ceiling. It sounded like time, bleeding away. Beneath it, the scrape of picks against stone—slow, mechanical, hopeless. The rhythm of men too broken to rebel, too stubborn to die. He could hear their exhaustion in every swing. Could feel it, clawing at his spine.
He was one of them now.
From deeper in the Undercroft, voices rose. Not the muttered groans of prisoners—but sharp, clean syllables that cut the air like daggers.
"Shipment ready for the Peaks, Commander?" one asked—precise, clipped, like someone raised to believe efficiency was virtue.
"The northern extraction sites need more," came the reply, deep and metallic. "Zephyros quotas. They'll work them until the bones snap."
Lugal froze.
The Windswept Peaks.
A name from myth—mountains like daggers stabbing the sky, where the wind never slept and cities floated like mirages on invisible air. He'd seen glimpses once, from the highest spire of the Crowns. Strange silhouettes dancing across the clouds—sky-riders, wind-fed and cruel. He'd thought them phantoms.
They were real.
And he was being sent there.
His breath hitched, shallow and fast. The Peaks weren't a place you returned from. They were punishment made sublime—beauty masking brutality. They'd mine the Akar of wind from cliffside veins, and men like him would hang by ropes like dead weights, chiseling the sky.
The Crowns hadn't imprisoned him. They were exiling him. Discarding the tool that broke.
He sank lower, forehead pressed to wet stone, arms curled in tight. Salt touched his tongue—not from the wall, but from tears, sharp and unbidden.
Above him, the city turned without him.
Embermark—its smokestacks coughing soot into the heavens, its nobles sipping firewine behind enchanted glass, its children like Hatim running barefoot through alleys where dreams rotted faster than food—carried on.
Lugal had once clawed his way from the ash-choked Sinks to the glittering spires. Now he was being shoveled out like refuse.
And Hatim's voice—bright, infuriating, alive—floated through his memory like smoke.
"That job might cost you."
He'd laughed, once.
Now his ribs ached from it.
It had cost him everything.
Not just freedom. Not just status.
Hope.
That glimmering idea that he could be more than the bastard son of a belt-wielding drunk. That he could outclimb his blood. Outclimb fate.
He curled tighter, nails biting into his own arms. Fury boiled where pride used to be. A black, simmering thing. The Crowns had mistaken him for dead weight. They would learn otherwise.
He memorized the sound of the guards' footsteps as they walked away. Counted the heartbeats between each echo. Committed the scent of mildew and despair to memory.
He would not forget.
And if the Peaks broke him, they would break a thing that screamed the whole way down.