Year: 3045 AGD

Month: New Year

First Eighthday

Continent of Terroval

Mine

When he awoke, he nearly blacked out again as the manacles chafed the burned flesh of his forearms when he moved. Once the pain of the sudden movement began to subside, his forearms began to itch as if an army of ants had taken up residence under his skin. The intensity of the sensation was, in its own way, worse than the pain had been.

Looking around, he noticed that the two Goblins were asleep nearby. He had no way of knowing how much time had passed since he had lost consciousness, not that it mattered all that much. Laying his head back he decided to let his companions rest. Distantly, he heard the reverberation of picks striking stone, but he knew that it would be days before any help would materialize.

He sat there for quite some time, trying to come to terms with their predicament and attempting to ignore the constant itch resonating from underneath the blood red manacles. Finding a small amount of comfort in the fact that he was only in a minor amount of pain at the moment, he allowed his thoughts to drift, and once again fell into darkness.

“Does this hurt?”

Holding back a gasp of pain, Dalton Alexander Theromvore just barely managed not to swear at the woman who had started his branch of the family tree some seven hundred years ago. “Why yes, Tyrdra, that does hurt.”

“Tyrdra? You must be in pain; I don’t think you’ve ever called me anything but Greatest Grandmother.” She laid her hand upon his leg, eliciting the long line of expletives that he had been holding back. “It is definitely broken. Looks like a clean break. I could fix it for you, but I think the experience will be a good learning tool.”

“Learning tool? On what? Enduring pain? We’ve already got courses like that at the academy.”

“No, nothing so barbaric. This will simply be a lesson on why we don’t do foolhardy things in the middle of combat. There was absolutely no reason for you to slide across that table; it would have been just as quick to run around it, or jump the entire thing.” Tyrdra looked at him, her sea green eyes piercing into his skull.

“Oh come on, how was I supposed to know that the board would be loose? What are the chances of that ever happening again?” Dalton complained.

“The chances of it happening again become zero if you never do anything so foolish ever again. First of all, you put way too much momentum into that slide. If he would have turned around and shot you, it is likely that you wouldn’t have been able to do anything to stop him. That’s one of the reasons they don’t teach you to jump around and such foolish maneuvers in training, because it is extremely difficult to go on the defensive when your body is already going along a set path. Small, precise movements are the way to do battle. Every action should be well planned out in order to maximize your offensive and defensive potential.”

Tyrdra began to wrap his leg with a roll of cloth that she had pulled out of her pack. Each time the wrap made a full rotation around his leg it shot a small burst of pain through his system.

“Okay,” Dalton said, panting between jolts of pain. “I promise that I’m not going to do anything stupid anymore, and I will follow my training to the letter from now on. Can you please just heal my leg now?”

“Oh, quit being such a hatchling,” Tyrdra said. “You know, it wasn’t that long ago that an injury like this could take months to heal. A clean break like this, you should be running around again by the end of the week. Each time your leg aches or gets itchy, it will drive home the fact that you need to think before you do something.”

“What are we going to do in the meantime? These hills are teeming with Orcs and Goblins, and I won’t be able to protect myself with a broken leg.” Dalton thought that he had her at that point, but a moment later she started flinging marble shaped projectiles at him. It only took him being hit by two of them to realize that if he didn’t do something he might get even more hurt. He scrambled backward and found a tree branch that he could use to intercept the small balls of force. He used one hand to continue pulling himself backward, aided by his good leg, and used his other hand to bat the projectiles away from his body.

“You seem to be able to defend yourself well enough,” Tyrdra said as she bent down to repack her supplies.

“You are crazy,” Dalton muttered

“We’re all crazy in different ways, you know,” Tyrdra replied with a wink. “What matters is that you are aware of your own special brand of crazy so that you can use its strengths and neutralize its weaknesses.”

“Is everything a lesson to you?” Dalton asked, using the tree to stand up on his good leg and using the branch that he had been using to defend himself moments before as an impromptu cane.

“The only time you should ever stop learning is when you are dead. The only time…”

Kid, wake up.

“Kid,” the smaller Goblin said, shaking his shoulder.

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“I’m awake,” the boy replied, trying to remember who he was and where he was after his latest dream. It didn’t take him long to reach that unreachable spot in his mind. It was the place his mind always went to when he tried to remember who he was. Something always stopped his probing, though, and if he tried too hard to break through he would end up temporarily damaging other portions of his mind.

One day he had attempted to break through for most of a night, and the next morning he couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. His ears worked fine and he could hear the sounds they were making, but he couldn’t process them into words. It had taken three days for his headache to lessen, and a day later he began to comprehend what people were saying once again. Ever since that day, he had only very carefully probed the space where he felt his identity was kept secreted away from his consciousness.

He pulled his thoughts away from his internal problems and opened his eyes. The smaller Goblin sat about a foot away from him, clearly uncomfortable.

“Do you have a name?” he asked, surprising the Goblin.

“A name?” the Goblin replied.

“Ha,” the larger Goblin said, sitting up from where he had been laying quietly, conserving his strength. “We are slaves. Slaves are not worthy of names.”

“You must be called something,” he murmured.

“Drog’atol,” the smaller Goblin said. “It means without will.”

“But you have will, you are here, alive because of it.”

“Yes, we are alive, but we are not free. What good is will if you cannot use it?” the larger Goblin said. “We are slaves until we are no longer chained and can walk into the hills on our own. Until then, we are nothing more than tunnel rats, like you.”

“I am not a tunnel rat!” he yelled, standing for the first time since the manacles had burned his wrists. Instead of the piercing pain that he expected as he jostled his chains around, nothing but a dull ache accompanied the movement. This surprised him enough that he didn’t register that the Goblins had taken a step back when he suddenly stood. Probing the outer area where the manacles covered his skin, he found that the flesh was very sensitive, but no longer on fire. He attempted to look under the manacles at the skin beneath but found that his swollen forearms had bonded with the blood red material.

“Perhaps someday that will be true,” the smaller Goblin said, “but until that day comes, you are Drog’atol, like us. For that day to come though, we need food and water. We talked while you were asleep, and we don’t think that the guards took the day's rations with them when they ran from the quake. They shouldn’t be very far away. If the three of us spread out on the path, we should be able to locate them.”

When they began moving farther into the tunnel, he noticed that the Goblins were moving slowly in a crouched position with their hands out in front of them. It was then that he realized that they couldn’t see, and that there was no light. He wondered why it was that he could see things down here clearly for some distance without any light, and almost asked his companions about it, but a small voice in his head warned him against it.

It didn’t take them long to make it back to the area that had been set up as their work station for that day. Sure enough, the supply packs were sitting right where the guards had set them down earlier that morning. Their slow crawl through the dark made it a long trek towards the packs, and he had to pull the chain a little several times to get the other two to head in the right direction, but they eventually made it. He brushed a lot of rock debris and dust off of the packs before opening them to see what they held. Inside of the first pack was a container that held dozens of compact bars of food: their usual work rations. The other pack, however, held a half dozen packages that contained dried meat, some sort of biscuit, and several different kinds of dried fruit.

Hanging off the side of each pack was a large bladder. The one that hung on the bag containing the workers' rations contained water, and the other contained something that smelled sickly sweet. They each took several swigs of water before taking one of the lunches that had been prepared for the guards. The boy had never had meat that wasn’t thrown into some other dish, so he savored the flavor of each bite. The biscuit was much softer than any of the ones that they had ever been served, and he found that some of the fruit was much too sweet for his taste buds.

“Funny that it takes a cave in for me to have the best meal of my life,” he said to no one in particular.

“While this stuff is good after the things we’ve been fed for the past year, if this is the best food you’ve ever eaten, then you, my young friend, have yet to truly live,” the smaller Goblin said. The larger Goblin grunted in agreement as he ate from his second package of food.

∞∞∞

They had just settled down to rest when a slight breeze rustled the boy’s hair, catching his attention. Looking around to see where the breeze might have emanated from, he noticed a square hole a few feet off the ground near the next bend in the tunnel. It didn’t take long to convince his companions that they should check out the vent, all of them understanding that it could be a potential way for them to escape.

As they neared the hole, two things became immediately apparent to him. First, that he would not be able to reach the shaft without some assistance, and second, that there was very little chance that the larger of the two Goblins would fit in the vent. He was still hiding the fact that he could see clearly in the dark tunnels, so it took them a little while to “locate” the source of the breeze. Once they reached the vent, he had the Goblins help him into the shaft.

There was only a couple of feet of chain separating each of them, so he was limited in how far he could go into the shaft, but as he moved into the air vent he realized that it was a moot point anyway. Several feet ahead, a large rock had busted through the roof of the shaft, likely shaken free by the quake. Half of the vent remained clear, allowing air to come and go, but the hole was much too small for any of them to fit through.

Keeping up appearances, he moved into the vent as far as he could before he felt the chain go taut, the rock that had busted through the top of the vent was just out of reach. The Goblins seemed nearly blind in the darkness, however, so he knew that he was close enough that the two would never know the difference.

“Damn,” he whispered, just loud enough for it to carry back through the shaft to his companions.

“What?” the smaller Goblin said, his voice coming from the mouth of the vent, likely being held up by the larger in order to give the chain as much slack as possible.

“There’s a big rock blocking half of the shaft, I’m coming back out.” Following his words, he began to inch backwards, trying to kick the chain behind him as he went so that it didn’t get bunched up under his body. It took him about twice as long to get out of the shaft as it had taken him to crawl into it, but he took a deep breath when his feet landed on the tunnel floor. He had realized in those few moments of being in the shaft that he was not a fan of such a cramped environment, and the comparatively large mining tunnels were a welcome relief.

“Well, I don’t think he could fit into the vent anyway,” the little Goblin said, motioning towards the larger. “So, it looks like we are stuck waiting until they open the tunnels up again.”

The boy nodded before realizing that his companions probably couldn’t see the motion. “You are right, and at least we know there is air coming into the tunnels still, so we won’t die from the air becoming stale. Let’s head back to the rations, since we have nothing else to do but wait.”