A raw cough tore from his lungs. Where…? Who…? The name "Leonardo" felt like ill-fitting skin. Panic flared, cold and sharp. Then, a familiar voice, strained: "Leonardo! Move your feet!"
"Why me?" he muttered, sighing as he opened his eyes. His miner's helmet flashed, blinding him before he could see clearly.
"Why can't I just find one…" he whispered, "one reason."
"That's two! Three more to go, Leonardo! 'Nard?" Ronald called, his voice muffled by his dust mask.
"Wait… deep breaths. I haven't even found one yet," Leonardo replied, wiping sweat from his brow. His deep brown hair clung to his forehead.
"You found two in less than a day. Isn't agnite supposed to be rare?"
"Don't tell me that—scream at the mines," Ronald replied with a crooked grin.
"I just can't seem to—"
His pickaxe struck something unnervingly solid—not rock. He crouched, brushing away clumps of cold, wet dirt. A faint, wrong blue light pulsed beneath.
He pried it loose—a stone, cold as grave dirt, its light casting sickly shadows on his calloused palm.
Leonardo stared. The unnatural blue pulsed against his skin, a rhythm that felt less like light and more like a slow, subterranean heartbeat.
It hummed in his teeth, in the marrow of his bones—a wrongness deeper than the mine's darkness.
Ronald was beside him instantly, his eyes reflecting the eerie light, wide with disbelief. "Is that…?" He reached out, then snatched his hand back as if burned.
"It looks… wrong." Leonardo turned the stone.
A vein of pure, blinding blue light suddenly flared within its depths, searing his vision. He almost dropped it.
"Rald has to take it," Ronald breathed, desperation edging his voice. "He… he owes us. From before Mom…"
"He'll kill us if we mention Mom," Leonardo sighed.
"He'll feel guilty not to."
Leonardo stared at the stone. Its glow lit his face. Cold. Like her hands when I closed her eyes.
Ronald was counting profits. But all I saw was blue—the same shade as her sheets, her cough, the cracks in our floorboards.
This wasn't luck. It was a receipt. Blood, radiation, another year scraped off me.
But Ronald was smiling, so I swallowed the bile. Let him dream. Someone has to.
"Oi, boys, move out the way," a gruff voice barked.
Leonardo stumbled. The agnite rolled away, light screeching through his vision.
"You okay?" Ronald called, grabbing the stone.
A burly miner passed, lugging a heavy metal rod. Another followed, supporting it.
"You alright, kid?"
"Yes, yes," Leonardo muttered, brushing himself off.
"What's that for, Cedric?" Ronald asked, eyeing the rod.
Firestones overhead flared to life. Groans followed as miners shielded their eyes.
"Not the firestones again," one muttered. "We need better lighting in here."
The cave lit up. Leonardo's tunic, earthy brown, blended with the stone. Leather patches reinforced the elbows and shoulders. His fingerless gloves were padded for precision.
Ronald wore a similar outfit, his carryall strapped tight.
The bell clanged—a sound like a coffin lid slamming shut. Every miner froze mid-swing.
Tools clattered to the stone floor in near unison. Heads snapped toward the tunnel entrance, eyes wide, postures rigid.
Leonardo saw old Man Harker flinch violently, his hand instinctively going to the thick, scarred ridges visible through the tears on the back of his tunic.
A choked silence fell, broken only by the frantic skittering of rock-rats fleeing deeper into the dark.
Cedric's jaw tightened, his knuckles red where he gripped his pickaxe shaft. He gave Leonardo a single, loaded glance: Don't move. Don't breathe. The shuffling, wheezing approach began.
The Overseer lumbered into the firestone light, his bulk casting a monstrous, shifting shadow.
A Mokri, fur like oil-slicked tar, padded beside him, its breath a visible cloud of decay. "Greet the Overseer!" it rasped, saliva dripping onto the stone with a faint hiss.
"Hail the Overseer!" The chant was ragged, ripped from forty throats, thick with fear and loathing. Tools lay discarded.
The Overseer's small, piggy eyes scanned the lines. They landed on Leonardo, still half-crouched, pickaxe not fully dropped. "You." The word was a gravelly accusation. "Why standing?"
Leonardo's blood turned to ice. He forced his fingers open. The pickaxe clanged loudly in the silence.
"Move. Or twenty lashes, pig." The Overseer didn't wait, already turning away dismissively. "Dig. The Duke's agnite won't mine itself." He coughed, a wet, rattling sound, and spat a gob of black phlegm near Leonardo's boot. "Mokri. Guide."
Leonardo kept his head down, but his jaw clenched. Rotting carcass, he thought, focusing on the black spittle. You choke on our dust while we choke on yours.
An image flashed – not of sky, but of his mother's hands, steady as she sang in this very cave system before the coughs took her. I'll see you buried first.
He forced himself to take a slow, silent breath through his nose, the stench of the Mokri thick in the air.
"Guide me unto the task," he muttered to the Mokri, his tone like a relic—cold and dead.
"Yes, master," the Mokri said, leading him deeper.
"Why do they all act like gods?" Leonardo asked.
All overseers are royalty. Doesn't change the fact they deserve death, Ronald muttered quietly.
As they departed, the firestones dimmed. Shadows returned. Work resumed. The rumbling grew louder.
Then, a low murmur of curses rippled through them.
A man near Leonardo kicked a loose rock violently against the wall. "Stupid kid! Coulda got us all flayed!" he snarled, rounding on Leonardo.
Cedric stepped between them, his bulk imposing. "Ease off, Jax. He froze. Happens." But Cedric's own eyes, when they flicked to Leonardo, held a hard warning.
Leonardo just stared at his pickaxe, the rough grain of the wood biting into his palm.
Why me? The unspoken question hung heavy in the dusty air. Jax spat on the ground near Leonardo's feet before turning away.
Leonardo turned to Ronald, a question on his lips. He stopped. Ronald wasn't looking at him. His brother's face was a blank mask, eyes fixed on a point somewhere in the dark beyond the tunnel wall.
Thud. Adjusted. Swung. Thud. No wasted motion, no flicker of expression. It was like watching a clockwork figure wound too tight. The easy camaraderie from finding the agnite was gone, replaced by a chilling, silent efficiency.
Leonardo's own fear curdled into something colder. "Ronald?" he ventured. Ronald didn't flinch, didn't pause. Thud.
The cave rumbled. The first time today.
Three rumbles meant collapse. The old Overseer had warned them.
"Let's go, Ronald," Leonardo urged.
"Wait—we could find one more…" Ronald said, desperation sharp in his voice.
Back in his quarters, the Overseer unlocked a heavy case, revealing the coiled lash.
He pulled out a small, cracked portrait from his coat—a girl, hollow-eyed.
"Work them to the bone, Lira," he whispered, thumb tracing her cheek. "To death. Whatever it takes…" A cold draft swirled. "You promise me, father?" A skeletal grip landed on his shoulder.
He winced. "I promise." The Mokri's shadow swallowed the wall. "The dead fester, Master. They do not forgive."
The cave path twisted with false ends. Lanterns lit the way.
"If we'd waited, we could've found more," Ronald muttered.
"We need to get out. It's not safe," Leonardo snapped.
The cave shook again. Rocks fell.
"Watch out!" Leonardo shouted, yanking Ronald to safety.
"Yeah… thanks," Ronald murmured, fear setting in.
For a long moment, Leonardo just breathed. The air, cold and damp and tasting faintly of metal and distant decay, was the sweetest thing he'd ever known.
He let the rough stone wall hold his weight, feeling the tremors in his legs slowly subside.
"I just wanted to be free, but now it feels…" Ronald trailed off.
"Unrealistic," Leonardo said.
"Maybe we should leave," Ronald whispered, his voice barely audible over the dripping water.
He wasn't looking at Leonardo, but at the jagged tunnel mouth leading deeper.
"I just wanted…" He trailed off, his hand unconsciously rubbing his chest. He took a shuddering breath.
"Out there… Volnia… the moons… something… anything." He finally turned, his eyes holding a wild, almost feverish glint that made Leonardo recoil slightly.
Ronald leaned against the dripping rock, eyes wide and glassy.
"Nard… remember the stories? The sky-fire ships? The green forests in the old traditions?" He coughed, a wet rattle. "We have to get out of Volnia. Before… before this place turns us to stone."
"We need to get out. Now," Leonardo snapped, grabbing Ronald's trembling arm. Ronald flinched, his eyes wide and unfocused.
Mom's boys. Killing ourselves. For what? The thought was a cold knife in Leonardo's gut.
They reached a resting pit, one of many in the cave's depths. A pause.
Ronald nudged him. "Hey. Your neck…" Leonardo raised a grimy hand, touching the skin below his ear.
A faint, eerie green luminescence stained his fingertips where he wiped sweat.
She coughed blue dust onto her sheets. Same blue as that damned stone.
Now Ronald… and this poison light on me. He pulled his collar higher. "Dust," he lied, the word tasting like ash.
Leonardo's mother had coughed blood for weeks. The blue glow haunted him still.
At last, they reached the cave entrance.
Leonardo stumbled out of the mine mouth, Ronald leaning heavily on his shoulder.
The sudden rush of cold, damp air hit them like a physical blow, scouring the thick dust from their lungs, making them both cough violently.
Leonardo gasped, dragging in deep breaths that tasted faintly metallic but blessedly free of rock dust. He sagged against the rough laterite wall, its chill seeping through his tunic.
Above, the twin moons, Kael and Soril, cast their silvery, decaying light over Volnia.
It caught the crumbling watchtowers, glinted off distant, tarnished bronze spires—ancient sentinels forgotten by time.
Ronald slid down the wall beside him, head tilted back, eyes closed, his chest rising and falling rapidly.
The faint, unnatural green glow was visible again on Leonardo's neck in the moonlight.
He looked at Ronald's exhausted face, then down at his own hands—raw, bleeding in places, permanently stained with grime and the faintest blue residue.
He remembered an ethereal light, the feeling of being smoke. Seeds need dirt. The memory felt like a dream, or a dying man's hallucination.
He lifted his gaze back to the vast, decaying vista, the moons painting everything in shades of bone and sorrow.
A wave of crushing fatigue mixed with a strange, hollow ache washed over him.
"To see that…" he murmured, his voice raw. "Maybe… maybe it was worth it?" Ronald didn't answer. He was already half asleep, his breath shallow and quick.
Leonardo touched the faint green glow pulsing at his neck. Was it worth her hands going still?
A sudden, violent cough tore from his throat. His head exploded in agony as the emerald light on his neck flared, burning with unnatural, vibrant intensity.
"Argh!" Leonardo screamed. He wrenched sideways, collapsing onto the hard floor. "It hurts! Gods, it hurts!" He clawed at his temples, smashing his forehead against the cool tiles, desperate for any relief the impact might bring.
But the searing pain only intensified, a white-hot brand driving deeper into his skull.
"Leonardo!" Ronald cried, rushing towards his writhing brother, confusion and fear stark on his face. "What's happening?!"
But Leonardo didn't hear him. The cave dissolved—walls peeling away like mist scorched by lightning. The mine's dust became a sterile wind. The agony tore something loose, and his mind—his self—was flung outward.
Light swallowed everything.
"And that's how General Tollhdem won the War of Generations," the guide announced, gesturing toward a life-sized statue. "An unwinnable war, won. A future, written."
Tour Guide Milah cut an imposing figure—tall, robed like a scholar of dead empires, his eyes holding the weight of curated endings.
He moved through the grand hall less like a host and more like a personification, or literal death shepherding ghosts toward their last exhibit.
They were all dead. Some wept without tears. Others stared at their fading hands, clutching the echoes of their deaths like lifelines.
One tourist, his form shimmering like heat haze, rasped: "I can't remember my name… only the knife. The cold."
"The dead cling to stories," Milah said, his voice smooth as a tombstone. "Here, your final narrative takes root. For the living, it becomes imagination. For you… a cradle. Or a coffin."
The Museum of Narratives stood like a bridge to the Realms' eras, its towering structure stretching into conceptual infinity. A place where endings were repurposed as beginnings.
As the group passed Tollhdem's statue, the floor breathed. Colors bled into shapes: a splash of crimson became a dying soldier; a streak of gold mimicked falling artillery shells.
A blond tourist, fist clenched as if still holding a sword, breathed: "Tollhdem was a god! Are there others like him?" Hunger sharpened his translucent features.
Milah paused. A question mark flickered above his brow, melting into a filament's glow.
"A tale born on Earth, long after Tollhdem. Where hope is mined like a curse."
"Volnia?" scoffed a woman missing half her jaw. "Isn't that from the human space conquest era?—"
Milah gestured toward the light that was the museum. "Today… you cross the threshold."
His gloved hand slid across an exhibit. "Leonardo it is," Milah murmured, as if tasting radiation.
"Why him?" demanded a ghost with rope burns circling his neck.
"Because like Leonardo," the guide said grimly, "you all feel caged. You crave freedom... but cannot take it."
"Why is this the end?" The question came from a man whose severed arm still dripped phantom blood onto the floor.
Milah's smile was sorrow etched in ice. "It is never truly the end, you will live and grow in the stories you become."
His glove brushed the wall. For a heartbeat, his fingers dissolved into the same fading smoke as the tourists—a glimpse of shared decay.
"Will we forget?" whispered a woman clutching the ghost of a child.
"Forget?" Milah's voice softened. "Yes. And become. Stories need souls. Souls need pain. Seeds… need dirt."
He turned toward the archway. The floor liquefied, reflecting not the tourists, but Leonardo—sweat-stained, terrified, green light pulsing at his throat like an infected heart.
"Come," Milah whispered, his voice fraying. "Your cradle awaits."
Leonardo's scream tore through the museum.
Ozone and wet stone savaged his senses—the museum's sterile perfume shredding like rotten cloth. The clang wasn't sound—it was memory hammered into bone.
The crystalline floor didn't dissolve.
It exploded.
Shards of light became jagged rock. The weight of worlds crushed Leonardo's skull—cold, suffocating metal clamped over his head, sealing him in roaring silence.
Stale. Blood. Rot.
His ghost-body slammed back into flesh—aching, heavy, real. Jagged stone bit into his cheek. The only light: a sickly blue pulse deep in the mine's gullet.
His hands, phantoms seconds ago, now screamed. He woke up.