The boy in the dusk

The chains clinked every time he moved—soft, rhythmic, like wind chimes made from bone.

They were iron, rusted and cold, cuffed too tight around wrists that had already forgotten what freedom felt like. Nareth had stopped trying to pull against them. The metal bit into his skin whenever he moved too fast, too slow, or in a way the demons didn’t like.

Most days, he moved just enough to stay alive.

The Obsidian Spires were not a prison. Prisons had rules. The Spires were a mouth that chewed people slowly and spat out bones.

Heat bled from the walls. The black stone was alive with fire veins, glowing faintly beneath the surface. The sky above was always dust-colored—like the world had forgotten what blue looked like. Ash drifted from some volcano in the distance, never heavy, but always there. It got in your throat. Your eyes. Your blood.

That morning—if it was morning—Nareth was hauling bricks up a slope that wasn’t meant for human feet. Just another wall for the demons to decorate with skulls or flame or nothing at all. He didn’t ask.

He didn’t speak anymore.

The first few days he’d tried. Asked questions. “Why are we building this?” “Where do the taken slaves go?” “Is there water?” They laughed. Then they beat the curiosity out of him.

Now he listened. Watched. That was all he had left.

No sword. No flame. No divine blood or god-blessed birthmark. Just tired eyes and a mind that refused to break.

They didn’t even call him by name. Just “you.”

He didn’t correct them.

It started with a sound—low, cracking, like a bone snapping beneath weight. Nareth turned just in time to see the tunnel entrance behind him buckle.

Miners—slaves, like him—scrambled out, coughing, covered in black dust. One slipped and hit his head. Another just disappeared into the cave-in, swallowed by stone.

Demons shouted. Some laughed. One asked if anyone had bet on how many would die today.

Nareth stood still.

The demons argued with each other in that harsh, growling language of theirs—Abyssal, he’d learned to recognize it, even if he couldn’t understand the words. The overseer, a tall, red-skinned brute with molten eyes, slammed a halberd into the ground.

“Collapse again, and I will flay every last one of you,” he growled.

One of the miners tried to explain that the tunnel was unstable—that the supports had been placed wrong. The demon kicked him in the chest and sent him tumbling down the slope like a sack of old potatoes.

And that’s when Nareth saw it.

He didn’t mean to.

But his eyes caught the pattern. The way the bricks were stacked. The subtle lean. The imbalance.

He blinked, heart suddenly thudding.

There was a fault in the structure.

And they hadn’t seen it.

He looked up the slope. If they kept digging the way they were, the entire shaft would collapse. More would die. And he didn’t know why, but that thought unsettled him more than it should’ve.

So he stepped forward. Not even thinking.

“There’s a support failure,” he said, voice rough. Dry. “Six rows above the arch point. If you shift the weight-bearing stones to the left brace, the pressure will redistribute.”

Silence.

One of the demons turned. A small one, but mean-looking, with spines down his back and gold teeth.

“What did the worm just say?”

Nareth froze.

He shouldn’t have said anything. His hands tightened around the rope he’d been carrying. His chains rattled. The demon walked up to him, close. He stank of smoke and hot blood.

“You think you know better than the overseer?” he sneered.

Nareth didn’t reply. He kept his head down.

Another laugh. Then—

“Try it. Let's see how smart this sack of bones really is.”

The demon waved a clawed hand, and two others dragged one of the support stones from the pile. With grunts and curses, they lifted it into place where Nareth had pointed.

The ground groaned. Everyone held still.

Then... nothing happened.

No collapse.

The tunnel held.

The demon looked up.

The overseer stared for a long, quiet second.

Then he turned and walked away.

Nareth returned to hauling bricks.

No one thanked him. One of the other humans muttered something under his breath, something that sounded like “lucky guess.”

Maybe it was.

But deep down, Nareth knew it wasn’t.

He couldn’t fight, couldn’t cast, couldn’t even lift a proper weapon. But his mind was... fast. Restless. Always watching. Always spinning things around, breaking them down, finding patterns.

It didn’t feel like power. It felt like noise. Like a voice in his skull he couldn’t shut off.

Sometimes he hated it.

But not today.

Because someone had seen.

She sat above them all, as always—watching from a shadowed balcony carved into the rock face, like a throne buried in darkness.

Serakha, the Warden of Thorns.

They said she was a noble-blooded demoness—born of fire, war, and something older. Her horns curled back like a crown of razors, and her eyes gleamed like twin suns at dusk. Her voice could strip flesh from bone if she willed it, and she never smiled unless someone was screaming.

She’d ruled this place for over two hundred years.

She didn’t speak that day. Didn’t descend from her balcony. But she saw.

And Nareth felt her gaze.

It clung to him like cold oil.

That night, they gave him less water. Just enough to keep him breathing.

He didn’t sleep. He kept replaying the moment over and over again. What if he hadn’t said anything? Would he be dead? Would someone else?

He didn’t feel clever. Just tired.

But the next morning, his work assignment changed.

No more brick hauling. No more digging.

Instead, he was sent to the planning chamber—a long, torchlit hall filled with maps, construction diagrams, demon architects, and slave scribes.

No one looked at him.

But he saw the cracks in the walls. The flaws in the blueprints.

And for the first time, he was afraid of what came next.