It was decided long ago that Shinian should be the common tongue. In addition to being the most central of all the powers, Shinia is also the most neutral of them all, offering their services to the other powers for the price of peace. Shinia’s centrality in conflict and geographic location made it the perfect place to conduct any negotiations between powers, so the language of Shinia was named the common tongue. Even the ascetics of Volkar deem the language useful enough to teach to their children.
Excerpt: An Overview of Inter-Power Politics – An unknown Mage
Erin started and opened her eyes as a bald, young man shouted out, “What? That’s so cool. What do these Runes do?” Instinctively, she almost answered the question but held her tongue.
Another young man, more like a boy when Erin considered it, however, had no such compunctions, “They’re primarily for supressing the Bloodline powers of Arikarans but they also grant increased durability to the cell and use enough of the world’s energy that no other enchantment will be able to properly function, at least if it’s inside the area the runes cover. “
Erin measured up the two. Clearly, the boy that had answered the question was from the Shinian kingdom. Not only did he possess knowledge of Runes, but he also looked like a Shinian. Messy brown hair covered the top of his head. It was dark. Dark enough that in the low light of the cell, Erin would have called it black if the flickering light from the torches in the hallway had not revealed a brownish gleam. Hazel-green, almond-shaped eyes took in the world and his olive-coloured skin seemed smooth. Even to Erin, who was in her late teen years, the boy seemed young, and she guessed that he was maybe thirteen at most.
Looking over to the other boy, Erin found herself much more hesitant to conclude his origins. While it seemed his natural skin was lighter than that of the younger boy, his skin was heavily tanned. Round, brown eyes peeked out from underneath brown eyebrows. Dressed in blue robes, his bald head was his most defining feature and also what confused Erin the most. No cultures specifically shaved their head so it must have been a personal choice or a very small, localised culture. With the colour of the young man’s skin, he could come from southern Atra Oblor, from Northern Ethana, Northern Stoele, or from Volkar. That was only if he was pure-blooded because, if he had mixed ancestry, then he could come from any number of places, including right there in Arikar.
What made Erin finalise her guess, though, was the young man’s ignorance. To the best of Erin’s knowledge, every great power utilised Shinia’s Runes except for Volkar. For the man’s amazement at seeing Runes, Erin guessed that it was his first time, which meant that he likely came from Volkar. Well... Volkar or the Savage Lands, but no-one had met with the beast folk in a civilised context in hundreds of years.
So, with her interest piqued by the Volkarian, Erin grinned internally. Erin didn’t think that the man would be affected by the power supressing Runes. Finally, this was getting interesting.
Not wanting to break her cover, Erin didn’t move and remained slumped on the bench, even as the bald man began asking the Shinian boy questions. Luckily, Erin didn’t have any difficulties listening to the conversation as the Volkarian emphatically asked about Shinian Runework. His energy was a stark contrast to the mood in the cell and it boiled over to the Shinian answering his questions. For the next hour, they annoyed the guards with their loud talk, but the Volkarian just didn’t care what he was threatened with; he just kept talking.
Eventually, however, the guards truly got fed up with them. Footfalls echoed down the hallway as men and women, dressed in leather armour and wielding weapons surrounded the entrance to the prison. Some more people, carrying a large number of shackles, followed behind them and entered the cell.
All of the captives were forced to put their hands behind their backs as they were shackled. Luckily, they weren’t rough with the captives so none of them broke down, screaming and crying, like Erin had expected at least one to do. Once everyone was chained, they were shuffled down the hall, up into the manor, and into wagons.
Throughout the ride, the strange, bald young man maintained an air like he was on a vacation. He didn’t seem to care about how he’d been captured or about the mood of any of the other prisoners. The Shinian, however, fell into the despondent air that pervaded the prisoners. Two more days passed as they were moved through the forested mountainside, before they finally were brought to a small village. A large, wooden palisade surrounded the houses, and far more guards patrolled the wall than were needed to protect the village from monsters.
Erin nearly smiled grimly; it seemed it would be far harder to escape than she had thought, especially if she had to bring along prisoners as witnesses. There was no point in worrying about it then, though, because, first, she had to gather evidence.
Erin remained slumped in the wagon, hanging her head as her shackles dangled, even as they passed through the crude gates in the wooden palisade. Simple, wooden huts seemed to suffice as houses and as protection from the elements. As the wagons slowed to a halt, guards milled around, talking. When all the wagons had stopped in a rough circle, the guards yanked open the doors to the cells and practically threw everyone out of the wagons.
Standing in a circle of guards, one man was holding a book. Erin looked him up and down, evaluating him. So far, he was the only person that Erin had seen was wearing any form of metal armour. He was wearing a full set of chainmail armour, making jingling sounds as he moved around. A sword was sheathed at his side and a spear was held across his back, underneath a small, circular buckler shield. Short, brown hair stuck up from his head and a neatly trimmed brown beard covered his chin. With a moderately defined jaw and relatively impressive musculature, he was more attractive than most. What truly caught Erin’s attention was the man’s power.
Erin could feel the power emanating from the man was at the Baron stage. While that wasn’t necessarily an indication of the man’s noble rank, if he even had one, it was the minimum level of power needed for one to become a Baron of nobility. In Arikar, the levels of power were classified as Lock, Key, Dawn, Dusk, Baron, Viscount, and so on. All the way up to Regent. Most people never had the ability to advance beyond the Dawn stage and, even then, they typically advanced to that stage, ironically, in their twilight years, when they were in their fifties or sixties. Erin, herself, was at the Baron stage but she could feel that the man was further into the stage than she was. As such, she was immediately wary of the man and marked him as a potential threat.
Opening the book in his hands, he picked a charcoal pencil up from between the pages and used it to count how many prisoners had been brought in. When he finished, he, presumably, noted down the number of new people. Looking up from his book, the man spoke, “As there isn’t much time left today, you will be left to your own devices. You may not leave this camp and the guards will stop you. I would recommend you wash yourselves in the natural hotsprings we have here, which have been separated by sex for privacy. It is up to you to decide where you sleep. As long as all of you are ready to work tomorrow and no one is injured, you’re free to work everything out yourselves.”
Turning around, the man immediately dismissed the presence of all the captives and headed to one of the few actual houses in the compound. Erin, looking around at all the other captives, waited for her manacles to be taken off. When the weights had been removed from her wrists, Erin rubbed them in relief. Glancing subtly at the two people who’d piqued her interest, she sighed and headed into the camp to explore.
It didn’t take Erin long to find the camp’s ‘baths’, though she used that word loosely. A thin dividing screen surrounded a small area of the camp, pressed up against the wall of the camp. Separated into two areas, one was marked with the word ‘women’ in Arikaran and the other was marked ‘men’. Entering the womans’ side, Erin took a look around. Inside, a small stream ran from the camp and widened into pools that had clearly been dug out. Spotting nothing to help her dry inside the area, Erin left the baths and walked around the camp, trying to find a hut with an empty bed. In the third hut she peeked inside, she found six thin, ratty straw mattresses. One of them appeared to be occupied, threadbare sheets stretched over the mattress, but the others had a small pile of sheets tossed on top of them.
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Mentally shrugging to herself, Erin decided to claim one of the beds. Grabbing the nearest one to the entrance, she quickly lay the sheets out and tucked them under the mattress. Inside the pile, Erin found a small towel, more reminiscent of a rag than a towel, which she guessed was to use after the baths. Grabbing the towel, she headed back to the baths. Inside, there was a small pile of soap on top of some stone. Grabbing the soap and grimacing at how much dirt and rock was on the bar, Erin stripped and left her clothes on some rocks. Somewhat self-conscious, Erin quickly made her way into the water and began scrubbing at the soap. Small pebbles were scratched off the bar and, when Erin felt that the bar was satisfactorily clean, she scrubbed at herself with the bar.
After not having a bath in nearly three weeks, Erin felt immeasurably better, even if the quality of the soap had her skin crawling. Drying herself as best she could, Erin clothed herself again and left the soap back on the rocks. Wandering back to the hut, Erin slung the damp towel over her shoulder as she wrung out her hair.
Erin entered the hut again and chucked the towel on the frame of her bed before laying down on the mattress and curling into a ball, staring at the wall. As Erin had entered, she’d noticed that another three of the beds had been occupied, two of them by the Shinian and Volkarian from earlier. Pretending to sob silently, Erin listened to the two talk for the rest of the day. From what she could tell, they were the only interesting people in the group she’d been brought with.
Unfortunately, however, nothing that either of the two had said piqued Erin’s interest. After that, it was a simple matter for Erin to set an alarm internally and then fall asleep.
As the moon was going down, Erin woke up from her light slumber. No one had come in or out of the hut or she would have woken up. Erin’s internal clock told her it was about three in the morning of the 28-hour day. She had about two hours to snoop around before she would have to get back into bed. Although the encampment was Runed to prevent anyone below the Baron stage from using their abilities – more to prevent prisoners from using their powers to escape than to suppress any assaulting force, plus it was cheaper to limit the scope of the Runes than to make a formation that suppressed everyone – none of Erin’s stealth abilities were from her Bloodline power.
Using the shadows from drifting clouds, Erin flitted about the camp and began mentally mapping all of it out. Moving from East to West, Erin began to meticulously map out the camp; every hut, every path, every log in the wall, every pothole that she could trip up on. After just over an hour and a half, Erin had finished surveying the camp and had it memorised. Returning to bed, she slipped back into a light slumber.
When Erin was woken up by the guards’ shouting, she immediately resumed her character. As she lethargically sat up, her shoulders slumped, and her head bowed. Shuffling out of the hut after her bunkmates; the two boys, the woman who’d been there before the others, and a strange man; Erin followed them to where the guards were watching over the prisoners. A large stack of bowls on a table was being slowly taken by the prisoners and, shuffling to a cauldron that was filled with gruel, so nasty that not even the most miserly of farmers would feed it to their pigs, Erin spooned some of the slop into a stained, wooden bowl.
Sitting by herself, she joined the rest of the prisoners in scooping it into her mouth with her hands. After only ten minutes, the guards forced the prisoners to get up and stick out their hands. Erin lined up with the rest and despondently raised her hands, waiting for the guards as they made their way down the line, shackling everyone in turn. Erin counted as each person, in turn, was locked in the shackles that suppressed peoples’ power. Even while she was counting the number of people who were chained, Erin added up the cost in her head for each of the shackles. Even though it would have had to have been work from lower levelled Shinian enchanters, the cost of outfitting the enslaving operation with so many power-suppressing shackles, let alone the formation that surrounded the camp, would have been exorbitant.
Someone was really banking everything on the operation succeeding.
Erin raised her pick and brought it back down with a resounding clang. Shivers ran up her arms as the metal head of the pickaxe vibrated. Erin’s fingers, which were already numb, gripped the shaft of the pick tightly as she repositioned herself and raised it above the rock she’d split from the wall of the shaft. Erin didn’t know what they were mining for, or if they were simply trying to clear out space, but her guess was that they’d found trace amounts of magical metal on the surface and were trying to find the vein it had come from. Erin’s pick came down on the rock, striking at a weak point she’d identified when it was split from the wall, and cracked the stone into rough halves.
As grey as the rest of the mineshaft, the inside of the stone was nothing to write home about and was just made of common andesite, with perhaps a small amount of magical reinforcement that had propagated from the metal Erin supposed was nearby. Erin let her pick fall to the ground, the head clattering as it collided with the stone, as she cleared away the small fragments of rock that had sprayed over the ground when she’d split the rock before grabbing the two split pieces of stone. Erin, not wanting to show her level at the First Stage, individually drug them along the ground to the collection point, so they could be marked with an identifier of where they came from and then they’d be carted up to the surface. From there, Erin was unsure where the rocks went but she supposed whatever noble was running the mine would have a team of experts analysing the rocks to look for any concentrations of desirable minerals. Those experts would likely be from Stoele as Stoelites had the ability to manipulate earth in various ways.
Erin didn’t exactly know why none of the Stoelites had been brought to the camp, but her best guess was that they were paid and contracted employees that had been tasked with analysing rock compositions and that they either didn’t have the abilities to locate large deposits of magical metals or they weren’t going to turn a blind eye to blatant, illegal slavery if they were brought in. While that did mean whoever was running this operation was going to be spending a little more money than if they’d just brought someone in to locate the metal, it also meant they weren’t imprisoned or executed for their crimes.
Dropping the pieces of stone, one after the other, at the collection point, Erin avoided the eyes of her fellow captives and drudged back down her tunnel, shoulders hunched and arms dragging through the air. Erin’s feet scuffed against the floor and, upon reaching her pickaxe, she lethargically grabbed the tool with both hands. Sighing and glancing at a guard as he patrolled down the tunnel, Erin swung her pickaxe up above her head, allowing her body to stretch out, and then brought it back down using all the muscles she could. The tip of Erin’s pickaxe dug into the wall and stayed as a small crack spider-webbed out from the tool.
Erin placed her foot against the slightly sloped wall and, with a light grunt of effort, pulled the pick out of the hole it had created. Erin brought the pick up again and, with a heave, brought the pick back down. This time, the tool missed the hole she’d created before as Erin loosened her control over her body but still stuck into the stone and a few more cracks webbed out from the impact point and some of the other ones widened. Once more pulling the pick out of the andesite, Erin turned the tool around and slotted the chisel head of the pickaxe into one of the wider cracks and, crouching down, pushed on the shaft of the pick from below. Grunting with the exertion, Erin begun to pry a large piece of rock from the wall as the cracks began to widen. Erin met a little too much resistance to completely pull the extract the piece of rock and so she had to pull the pick out of the wall again.
Erin was preparing to swing again when a sharp crack echoed out through the tunnel. Erin’s head immediately turned to look for the origin of the sound, finding a woman bent over her pickaxe, sobbing. The butt of the pickaxe was nestled in the woman’s shoulder and her legs had collapsed beneath her. Messy, matted brown hair hung down from her bowed head as her body shuddered. A streak of red ran down the woman’s back, marring her already dirtied clothing, and crimson ran in rivulets down the back of her shirt.
Standing behind her, a cruel smile on their face and a whip hanging loosely from their grip, was a guard. Red blood trickled down the leather of their weapon and dripped onto the ground as they coiled it up, their hands and the motion of coiling the whip flicking the blood off the leather. The guard said something indistinct and the sobs that wracked the woman’s body only worsened. Teeth gleaming in the light, the female guard kicked the woman, forcing the slave to her feet. Gripping onto the shaft of the pickaxe, the slave used it to steady herself as she climbed to her feet and the guard made the slave turn around so that their eyes met. Raising a hand, the guard took satisfaction in the slave’s flinch and just pushed her instead of hitting her, likely telling the slave to get back to work as the guard walked off.
Erin clenched her fist around the shaft of her pickaxe, her knuckles turning white, as she watched the guard walk off without punishment and the slave lifting her pickaxe, grimacing and shaking, and continue trying to work, impaired though she now was. The worst part was that it was a light punishment from what Erin had witnessed during her time in the camp. Most people received at least five or six lashes of the whip, which generally cut them to the bone, and were still expected to work afterwards. If that wasn’t bad enough, though, they generally contracted an infection and would probably die within a week or so, though she personally hadn’t witnessed any such deaths yet.
Maintaining her even breathing, Erin turned back to the task in front of her, removing stone from the wall. Bringing her pick back, this time aimed diagonally downward at the wall to widen the crack and help her remove the piece of stone. Erin’s pick struck, digging into the stone and cracking it slightly. Each swing marked the passing of time, getting Erin closer and closer to freeing the captives here. Each swing let Erin vent a small bit of the impotent rage she was feeling. Each swing broke stone, sending small shards cracking and crumbling to the floor, just like the slave camp operation would soon fall.