Revolution

When shall I ever grow to be a man?
When shall I shed this sloth and break its ban?
When shall I grow as once my promise swore?

Fain would I be a child, yet lack the right;
Fain would I be full-grown, yet purse is light;
Fain would I taste of joy, yet cause is found no more.

....

The soundless scream jerked him straight out from the depths of delirium.

That bloody vision suddenly shattered. It dissolved into an abandoned town burning under a murky red sunset, where cracked mud walls stood desolate, sand-laden winds shrieked through rotted window frames, and not a single living soul walked.

That nightmare clung to him relentlessly for four whole months in the depths of the pit.

He lived in perpetual dread, his throat bitter, nerves stretched taut as a bowstring on the verge of snapping. In the unbroken blackness of the stone cellar, he could no longer tell time. Yet each morning, when a fresh draft of freezing air whistled through the fissures to herald a new day, the old dream returned.

He lay motionless in the coal mud, listening to the faint rattle of his own breath. In a half-waking daze, he still imagined sweet, gentle sounds whispering beside his ears, as though a soft breeze was sweeping the clouds toward some distant land devoid of blood and hatred.

But as his eyes opened to the slate-gray rock, cruel loneliness crashed back in, that road ahead was his to walk alone.

Those smiles had once belonged to him, brimming with warmth and sincerity, yet now they were only faint, fading flickers in fractured dreams.

He drifted upon the threshold between waking life and shadow, only to snap awake to hollow isolation amidst weeping stone walls, wondering whether he should keep facing this living hell, or sink back into dreams that could never be.

His eyelids twitched violently.


...


Sevran opened his eyes.

Cold reality stripped away the last lingering embers of warmth at once.

At the bottom of this pit, day and night held no meaning. Sunlight was a forgotten luxury. In the cavernous belly of the prison camp, there was only the bone-chilling damp leaking through stone fissures, carrying the reek of rusted shackles and the stench of hundreds of bodies herded together like slaughterhouse cattle.

He did not groan, he did not beg, and he did not despair.

He merely waited for an opening.

The nightmares kept resurfacing, until in the fourth month, dysentery swept through the sheds like wildfire across dry steppe.

Starvation rations were slashed to half a bowl of spoiled, sour sheep-gut broth. Within ten short days, the slaves' digestive tracts deteriorated into ulcerated battlegrounds. The stone cellar became a silent slaughterhouse. Faint whimpers gave way to wet, phlegm-choked gasps.

Slimy waste and vomit coated the slick stone floor. One after another, rigid corpses slumped against the damp walls, eyes staring blankly into nothingness.

In that very mire of death, Sevran saw his way out.

He began rationing his water intake, deliberately forcing his body into a state of total collapse. When the slave beside him twitched and drew his last breath in the foul muck, Sevran did not push the body away.

Using his sound right hand, he scooped fistfuls of vomit and filth from the flagstones, smearing it over his face, neck, fingernails, and emaciated ribcage. He slackened every muscle, letting foul froth dribble from the corner of his lips, allowing swarms of flies to settle unmolested over his eyelids without flinching.

When iron-shod boots clicked down the slick steps, Sevran shut his eyes tight.

A guard hooked an iron pole through the chain at his neck and dragged him across the stone. A spiked boot drove viciously into his ribs, a practiced kick to test for signs of life. A rib cracked dry and sharp, but Sevran's frame merely jolted once and flopped back down like a sack of sodden rags.

"..."

With utter disgust, the guard spat a glob of grey phlegm onto his forehead, then jerked his chin for the other to heave Sevran onto the corpse cart.

...

Freezing coal ash, jagged slag, and snowy sludge buried him halfway. Lying motionless in the suffocating stench of sulfur fumes, he listened as the heavy tread and curses of the body-handlers faded into the blizzard.

Fifteen minutes later, dead silence claimed the waste grounds.

The northern gale shrieked through the ore gullies, whipping his grime-matted hair.

Sevran pushed himself upright in the freezing gloom, unwrapping the sodden rags from his left hand. Under the pale sky, his index and middle fingers had rotted into two blackened, pus-bloated sausages of flesh.

Four months in the cellar's damp had turned the shattered joints completely necrotic; yellow pus and black blood seeped through cracked skin, creeping across his palm toward the wrist.

If he did not sever them tonight, the poison of gangrene would reach his heart before dawn.

Kneeling on the ash heap, Sevran found a flake of flint slag, razor-thin and razor-sharp. Tearing a strip of coarse wool from his hem, he bunched it between his molars and bit down hard until fresh blood seeped from the corners of his mouth.

He pressed the cold, sharp stone edge flush against the base joint of his index finger.

"...Urgh..."

A wet, tearing sound broke against the wind as dead flesh gave way and cartilage snapped. Violent spasms racked his body, cold sweat washing clean streaks through the soot on his brow, yet his right hand did not waver for a fraction of a second. He scraped away splintered bone and rotten sinew, then sawed cleanly through the base of the middle finger.

Blood gushed from the raw stumps. Sevran reached behind him into the slag pile and dug out a fist-sized ember, still glowing red beneath the fine ash. Without hesitation, he jammed the bleeding stumps flush against the burning coal.

Sizzle...

White smoke billowed, thick with the stench of charred meat. Agony exploded in his skull, tinting his vision crimson, but not a single cry escaped his clenched teeth. Only when the flesh was seared into a hard, blackened crust did he spit out the bloody rag, collapsing into the snow with ragged, shuddering gasps.

He had traded two fingers on that slag hill for the right to go on living.

...

For the next half year, Sevran survived like vermin in the lowest gutters of Vark-South.

To secure shelter and meager sustenance, he offered himself as unpaid labor to Boran, a one-eyed blacksmith cast out by the guilds, who drowned his days in lead-tainted ale.

Sevran played the mute to perfection. He shoveled scalding slag, hauled buckets of foul creek water to quench steel, and pumped the heavy sheepskin bellows eight hours a day without a murmur, letting sweat carve filthy rivulets down his protruding ribs.

Yet beneath that mute shell, Sevran's calculating mind never rested for a single second.

He watched impoverished farmers from the southern marshes slip into Vark-South at dusk, concealing broken plowshares beneath ragged cloaks, weeping as they begged for illicit repairs with handfuls of copper bits.

Within the inner city, the Royal Institute and the Church held an absolute monopoly over all forged iron. A single plowshare bearing the Imperial seal cost half a year's barley harvest - a price that crushed farming households, forcing them to sell their children into the mines to clear debt.

He realized this world was utterly devoid of firearms. No cannons, no matchlocks, not a trace of sulfur or saltpeter combustion, not even crossbows yet. The Empire's absolute dominion rested purely on brute physical violence, reinforced by the mystical Kork-forging techniques passed down through royal rites.

Yet that imposing facade was rotting from the core: border garrisons starved of supplies, noble factions scheming over contraband ore veins, and tens of thousands of Sclerite miners with stone-scaled skin drugged into compliance on cheap lead-wine, harboring a powder keg of resentment waiting to ignite.

Sevran knew well that this realm's vital pulse did not lie in church prayers or copper-plated spires, but in the raw agony of survival. These wretches did not need high magic; they needed cheap, practical weapons to fend off starvation and death at their doors.

While swinging the hammer and pumping the bellows, Sevran quietly calculated physical limits: the tensile strength of scrap iron from cart wheels, the elasticity of boiled sheep sinew, and the density of dried animal bone hard as antler.

...

At night, once old Boran lay dead-drunk beside the stone anvil, Sevran began his true work.

He gathered discarded sheepskins from slaughterhouses, soaked them in lime-water to strip the rancid fat, scraped the fleece, and stretched them across the stone wall to dry. From the forge floor, he selected the hardest chunks of charcoal, honing them against river stones into sharp drawing points.

By the flickering light of an oil dish, his fingers traced a few designs across the stiff leather. He did not know how to build matchlocks, but during his years scraping by in the old world, he had learned how to make crossbows and various survival mechanisms.

Everything was complete save for a single detail: on the sleeve-blowgun schematic, a circle drawn in charcoal remained empty, marked with an unanswered question mark.

He was patiently waiting for the final catalyst.

...

When winter returned in the First Month, the cold gripping Vark-Aethel turned ruthless.

The bells of Korr-Vhur Cathedral tolled in festive cheer. Behind towering granite walls, nobles huddled around hearths fragrant with pine wood, wrapped in the illusion of order and warmth. But tonight, that illusion shattered inside Boran's squalid shack.

The wooden door was kicked off its hinges. Two Imperial tax collectors marched in, throwing the old smith's cracked anvil to the floor along with a red writ, either pay sixty copper groats in slag tax within three days, or have both kneecaps crushed by a sledgehammer.

As the two guards vanished into the snow, Boran collapsed onto the cold ashes of his hearth, broken beneath thirty years of accumulated despair. Howling in drunken frenzy, he grabbed a rusted crowbar, ready to smash the remnants of his forge and end this wretched existence for good.

Sevran's three-fingered left hand darted out like a trap, locking around Boran's wrist like an iron clamp.

The crowbar clattered to the stone. Without a word, Sevran reached into the ash heap, pulled out the bundle of sheepskins, and spread a few schematics across the anvil.

Boran scrambled over, his lone eye darting frantically across the charcoal lines. He saw bow arms, intricate bone triggers, methods for stanching wounds, ciphers, and numeric tables... things far beyond the imagination of a slum blacksmith. But after the initial shock, he shook his head and let out a weary sigh in the local tongue:

"It's useless... You're clever, boy, but this won't do." His trembling finger pointed to the crossbow sketch. "Imperial Kork armor is three inches thick, reinforced by royal sorcery. Weapons made from scrap iron will only shatter against it. We have no army, no warhorses. Taking to the streets only makes us meat for the butcher."

Sevran's expression remained colder than ice.

Over the marshland, Sevran had drawn a black charcoal circle containing a drop of fluid falling onto a barbed dart.

He tapped his severed knuckle against it.

...Thud.

His eyes locked onto Boran, sharp and unblinking.

Boran stared at the swamp, then at the black circle. His pupil constricted violently:

"The southern bogs..." The smith's voice broke. "The black-root weed of the Lithoral hunters... Rhe-Vhur sap!"

With shaking hands, he reached into his shirt and produced a thumb-sized clay vial sealed with beeswax:

"Just one drop... just one drop entering the blood through the seams of the armor - the armpit, the visor slit, the groin joint... You don't even need to pierce that three-inch plate!"

In a single breath, the schematics clicked into a complete war machine in Boran's mind.

Light crossbows made of bone and scrap iron, silent sleeve blowguns, and darts tipped with lethal Rhe-Vhur poison. No expert archers required; no brute strength needed. In an asymmetrical war, a starved child or a crippled beggar could hide in the shadows, aim at an armor seam, and bring down a fully plated Imperial knight on the spot.

Backed by medicine, covert ciphers, storable rations, and the impenetrable terrain of the Silent Ridges, this was no desperate peasant riot. It was a complete blueprint for asymmetrical warfare.

Boran looked up at the scarred face looming over the forge. A shock like thunder tore through the old smith's soul:

If it's him...

Look at him... Though wrapped in foul rags, he could chew on discarded bones to survive hunger, yet he was no vermin meant to rot in the mud. He did not have a single coin to his name, but who could say that chest did not burn with the ambition to seize the throne?

Today he was an unnamed slave buried in coal ash, but who could guarantee tomorrow his name would not echo across every realm?

He had crawled in the dark like a cornered beast for months, but when the time came, he would tear everything open to soar into the highest skies.

...

The history of this entire land would be rewritten from this moldering pile of slag.

Sevran took a step forward, the dying hearth fire catching the long scar along his jaw.

Raising his right hand, he pointed at Boran's mouth, then back to his own throat. Long-dormant neck muscles tightened. Vocal cords unused for half a year grated together, forcing out a harsh, dry rasp like two rusted blades grinding against stone:

"Teach... me..."

He pressed his severed knuckle hard against the Imperial map:

"...The... tongue."

Boran stood frozen for a few seconds. Then, overwhelmed by an authority heavier than steel, the one-eyed smith dropped to both knees in the freezing coal dust. His trembling hands touched Sevran's scarred feet, pressing his forehead to the stone:

"I will teach you... I will teach you every syllable of the Varkan tongue... So your words become the death sentence for this entire Empire!"

Sevran drew his hand back, thrusting it into his ragged pocket, his fingertips pressing into the sharp, cold edge of an iron slag flake.

In the winter nights that followed, inside the shack thick with the stench of rancid mutton fat and soot, Boran began drilling Sevran in the clipped syllables of the local dialect and set to work on the first designs. They sold whatever little of value remained in the house and scavenged scrap, their eyes fixed on the shared plan.

Sevran absorbed the new tongue swiftly and precisely, like a machine. But he understood all too well that a few bone crossbows or drops of poison were merely the physical shell of war.

What could truly detonate the powder keg of hatred smoldering in tens of thousands of stone-scaled miners and destitute farmers had to be a great figure, an ideological spark simple enough for the illiterate to grasp, yet venomous enough to transmute generations of subservience into destructive fire.

Staring into the flickering oil lamp, Sevran dredged through the dark corners of his mind, retrieving a story from the old world - a primer on how to kindle rebellion:

Cruel whips no more shall crack.
Riches more than mind can picture,

The memory faded in Sevran's mind.

He opened his eyes, looking down at the cold grey ashes beneath the anvil. He did not naively believe in the pristine equality painted by the white boar. Sevran understood better than anyone the brutal law of power: today's revolutionary vanguard would become tomorrow's wine-swilling tyrants.

Yet to the wretched outcasts of Vark-South, who had known nothing their whole lives but whips, scraps, and frozen slag, this was the lethal nectar their souls were starving for.

This was no campfire tale to pass a winter night; it was a prefabricated verdict for the entire Empire.

When the coals died down to faint embers, Sevran quietly pushed open the wicker door and stepped into the barren slag wastes.

The blizzard had ceased at midnight, leaving behind a silence so deep it bordered on the grotesque. The vast night sky arched overhead, crystalline and glittering with thousands of cold, sharp stars. His breath plumed into white clouds before dissolving into the void.

Standing alone on the slag ridge reeking of rusted ore, his gaze softened. From the deepest recess of the killer's heart, where he believed everything had turned to stone, fragments of memory stirred. Kau'i-vhur.

The only soul that had ever granted him a passing moment of peace in that earthly hell.

He remembered that late afternoon in the dank cell, when a stray beam of sunlight filtered down through a cracked ventilation flue. The sky cast a slant of light that turned her hair a dusty gold, throwing a fragile halo over a face smudged with soot. In that moment, a daze had washed over him...

His rough hand had gently brushed her tangled hair, clumsily humming a lullaby from the old world that she could never understand. Now, standing amidst the snow of Vark-South, he was frozen in place, quietly gathering each remnant of memory like scooping up warm embers amidst an expanse of ice.

He remembered her last bright smile before she slipped into the drainage conduit, only for him to find her the next morning - a stiff, strangled corpse discarded in the mud, her fist still clenched around a worthless piece of iron ore not worth half a coin.

Debts of sentiment are the hardest to repay.

All his life had drifted through cold arithmetic and cruelty. He had once owed his best friend a debt of life, a ticket through the spatial rift to escape terminal cancer. But that debt had been settled cleanly with a stroke of a blade. A life for a life, blood washing blood clean; so he told himself, so he would never look back.

Yet his debt to that innocent child remained an open wound in his chest that would never heal.

She had asked nothing of him. She had shared dry moss to wrap his feet, shown him the only escape tunnel out of the mines, and died in silence while he could do nothing to protect her. That grief did not weaken him; it condensed into a shard of jagged ice, driving deep into his flesh.

Sevran slowly lifted his left hand to eye level. Under the cold starlight, the two lumpy, dark purple scars where his index and middle fingers had been looked as gnarled as rotted knots on wood.

He clenched the three-fingered hand tight, fingernails biting into flesh until it ached. The familiar pain surged up his arm, reminding him of the price of survival.

He would never accept dissolving like a speck of nameless dust in this mire. Having chosen the hardest path, the path of a traitor and a plunderer, even if he had to drown in a sea of stench and blood, he would walk it to the bitter end.

A gust of wind cut through the tears in his clothes, carrying the piercing chill of the north.

Sevran looked up at the stars, brilliant yet unimaginably distant.

Tonight he would lie awake beneath the starry sky, wanting to laugh, wanting to weep just as he had the day he first met the girl...

Yet tears had frozen into ice long ago, and smiles had been buried deep beneath cold stone.

The brief flicker of vulnerability vanished in the blink of an eye. Sevran's gaze hardened, the familiar cruelty and resolve settling once more over his face.

Is there an hour when I forget my soul?
When silent mutiny defies control?
When New Year's chime is but the old year’s sound?