I tried not to shiver in the cold of the mines as wormwires threaded their way into my spine. The thin black tendrils burrowed into my skin to interface with my nervous system and connect me to my personal exoskeleton. I heard a confirmatory beep and I stepped away from the first station, allowing the next person to file in. I moved on and lay on a table while Servi workers attached my waiting exoskeleton. I pulled myself to a standing position, the exoskeleton weighing me down and I stood with my arms raised straight in front of me.
“Beginning calibration. Ready?” The technician asked. He had pupilless brown eyes with Copper sclera. I had the same full discs of brown, lacking a black center, but my sclera was a different metal, Bronze. I was one level higher than him, he had the first elevation of Rank. Copper then Bronze then Silver then Gold. Most would doubt that I would ever see Silver in my lifetime, let alone Gold, with my current resources and opportunities. One needed to join special sects, cultivator gangs, have great funds from a rich family, or be unusually fortunate to succeed at Ranking higher. I was the last, lucky you might say. Or just determined.
“Ready.” I confirmed.
“Please lower your arms and then raise them.” The technician said. He tapped buttons on a tablet.
I did so, the servos whining in the joints of the skeletal carapace system.
“Please cross your arms.”
I complied. I wondered, had this man had the fortune of a university education and then the misfortune to be banished down here, into the mines with the common men? We both were Servi, both on the Path of the Slave, but some men were born into more wealth and power than others. He was certainly no Faber Artisan, a higher classed servant of the Dominium.
“Please crouch.” He turned a virtual dial on his device as I dropped to my feet, letting my fingers brush the cold, dusty stone of the mine.
The Dominium ruled the eight wing systems of humanity and the core system of Sol Invictus and it was made up of men with many different Paths. Paths passed down from parents to children in their blood, forever binding them to their ancestors’ calling. I was a Servus and my children’s children and their children’s children would be Servi too.
“Please bring your hands to your face.”
I brought my hands to my face and suppressed annoyance. I had done this stupid ritual a thousand times.
“You’re good to go, Adrias. Have a nice day.” The technician said.
“Thank you.” I replied, with slight tension in the muscles underneath my skin. I didn’t know this man, why did he know my name? And there was something about how he had said to have a nice day, almost mocking. I didn’t like it or his smile.
I moved on in my exoskeleton, hopping lightly in it to the equipment and grabbed a power pick. The pick would cut into rock far easier than mundane metal. I moved into a line of miners and walked with them further inwards and downwards until I got to a place to begin hacking away at the stone. We would extract Jovium ore, the Heaven’s Metal painstakingly sifted from the ore later by industrial processes and hardworking Slaves.
And hack I did. With the power pick, the exoskeleton, and my Servi enhanced stamina, the work couldn’t be said to be hard, and I did the work of ten Unpathed humans, but it was monotonous and repetitive. Such was the life of the Slave. I supposed we weren’t really true slaves as our ancestors had been and our estranged cousins on worlds currently were. We got paid after all. On a distant planet like Lavinius far from both the capital planet of the Apollo system, Iulius, and farther still from Terra, the constraints of the Dominium slacked like reins in a lax charioteer’s hands.
I was almost so distracted by my own thoughts and my dull work that I didn’t sense the change in the air. What tipped me off was the quiet. Men never shut up down here, there was nothing to do but brag and argue and joke in the mines as you did your drudgery to earn your bread and wine. So, when everyone closed their mouths, something was awry. The hair on the back of my neck tingled and I turned around. A ring of men had surrounded me, and everyone around had stopped to watch like spectators at a circus.
“Can I help you?” I asked, tightening my grip on my power pick. They were all members or friends of the Cantion family. Damn. Damn you, Flavias. Why couldn’t you have kept your pants on? Why had you needed to entangle yourself with the daughter of a man like Gavias Cantion?
“You can lie down and die.” Dellias said.
“Your feud isn’t with me.” I said. “I have done nothing. Neither has my family. The only one who is to blame is my brother and I’m not standing in the way of you.”
“Our feud is with your whole bloodline. What your brother did is unforgivable.” Dellias said.
“The gods spit on you.” Galerias said. “The Lucions will burn in the Pit for eternity for defiling the pure scion of the Cantion family.”
“They spit on us, do they now?” I said. “Why don’t we see who the gods favor then?”
Dellias roared and launched his power pick at my chest with all the rage in his heart concentrated on the tip of his pick and all of his exoskeleton’s mechanical force in his swing.
His first mistake was swinging for the chest. A big target, one that he would savor the damage of. I was quicker than that though. I turned to the side and let it skim me, bringing out a line of crimson.
When you want to kill someone on the Path of the Slave, you go for the head. Servi are born to be beaten to a pulp by their masters and then wake up the next day to work in the fields and the mines and the kitchens owned by superior men of mightier Paths and wealthier genelines. Go for the head, because a Servus will never win a fight against his betters, but he can get up and lose a thousand times. He can be broken, but no matter how many pieces you make of him, he will stand when the sun rises. He will stand because there is work to be done and in truth his real master is not the man holding his leash but his Path. He will never escape his Path and thus he will never be outworked or completely broken.
I blocked his next strike. He hammered his pick at me and I danced through his striking strokes. He roared and his friends stepped into his aid. The group of them rallied together and tried to pin me down with their attacks.
His second mistake, he brought people he cared about. I sent my power pick through Galerias Cantion’s brains and Dellias screamed like he was the one who had just died instead of his half brother.
He fought wilder and wilder, breathing heavily like a bull. Idiot. His third mistake. A Slave’s advantage was his endurance at repetitive, slow and deliberate movements. All this flailing and roaring and swinging that he and his men favored as I took measured breaths, leaned centimeters out of their furious attacks, calmly stepped forward and backwards, was burning through their reserves.
They yelled out insults and swears and invocations to the unnamed gods and threatened to burn me alive and cut off all my limbs as they did so. Meaningless drivel in their throats and on their lips. They wouldn’t be doing any of that.
His fourth mistake. A Servus should never stand against a superior lifeform, no matter how many he had with him or how much they had trained. Of course, this last mistake wasn’t their fault. There were plenty of them on my level of Bronze and they were grown men unlike my sixteen years. And they didn’t know what I had been sensing bubbling under my skin for the past three weeks.
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“You want to see who the gods favor?” I screamed manically with a terrible, burning mirth. I liked to be more composed than what I was displaying, but the high of advancing up a Rank was a startling, raging thing.
The Muses’ choir sung. My fingernails glowed white. I smelled ozone in the air and tattoos of fire burned on my skin. My blood burned within my veins with solar majesty. Electricity flickered around me as my sclera, what had been the white of the eyes three years ago at the age of thirteen, turned from Bronze to Silver. The advancement lightning surged around me and struck the ground, hissing and humming.
“Skyfather’s Thunder!” One of Dellias’s men said and ran.
Paths were specialized in different things and advancement made you more of what that Path offered but it also made you more of what you were before your path. Your Foundation. Your base genetics and skills and conditioning before your eyes activated at thirteen. Most Servi were not warriors, but for a Bronze or a Copper to challenge a Silver, be they the Path of the Champion or the Path of the Courtesan, courted death. The gap between Bronze and Silver in capabilities was greater than the stretch between Copper and Bronze.
I reached out and ripped Dellias’s jaw off with the monstrous ease of Silver’s speed and strength and then fluidly worked my way through his men. The last began laughing as he tripped over his own feet and landed on his back.
“What’s so funny, dead man?” I asked.
“You’re too late.” He said with the god of death’s rictus grin on his face, his eyes locked on mine. “We wanted to get everyone at the same time.”
I didn’t give him the gift of a reaction, just brought my power pick down on his laughing face. I ran without taking off my exoskeleton. For one, it would take too long to unbind myself from the carapace and the drive the black wormwires from my flesh. For two, the one technician had clearly known I was about to be murdered, who knows how he might try to sabotage me now? For three, I might need it to kill some people if I got dogpiled. Hopefully my family still lived and I would be defending my little brother and my parents rather than avenging them.
I ran out of the mines, cursing my older brother and vaulting over crowds until I reached our humble home. A cramped house fit for a lesser family of Servi in the city of Illivea. The door was knocked off the hinges, the windows were smashed and fires were glowing within.
“I should have pushed for Silver earlier.” I said to myself bitterly. To press advancement early was to stunt your potential to grow further as well and reach the peak of Silver or move on to Gold. I had been a fool too self-absorbed with the thought of advancing to the heights of Silver but if I had made the transition earlier, I could have moved all of my family out of our current situation on the Lavinian Administration’s coin. Or I could have threatened the Cantions into backing down and they probably would have forgiven the feud under the lunar glare of my Silver eyes.
I entered our home and found furniture smashed and lit ablaze. And I found my family. I clenched my teeth together and my knuckles showed white as I gripped them hard. My exoskeleton whined in such a way that my grief distorted mind heard as the pitiful sounds from a dog. My family was…was…
They were dismembered, delimbed, and beheaded. My family’s torsos were piled in a corner, the limbs tossed around. My mother’s head was in a bubbling soup pot, my father’s head was on the dinner table on top of a plate like it was being served to me, my little brother’s head was above the fireplace. My older brother, Flavias, the cause of all of this with his lust for things he shouldn’t have touched, was missing.
I searched for him and found his pieces in another room. Flavias’s head had been taken by the attacking Cantions.
“May the Corpsefather snatch your soul.” I told Flavias’s corpse. If only Father hadn’t refused to give him up, maybe they might not have gone for the full murder of all of us. Or maybe they would have. Flavias sleeping with the Cantions’ daughter and taking her virginity when we were a lesser family aside, Gavias Cantion was a bastard bully of a man who had made his relatively obscene amounts of wealth for a Servus illegally and violently. He preyed on the poor, the prostitutes, the disabled, gambling addicts, and drunks. I wouldn’t let him drink my piss if he was dying of thirst.
I walked back out to the main space and looked at my little brother’s head on the mantle. I stared at him and the room seemed to waver and shake. I felt hot tears come down my cheeks.
I threw up. I fell to my knees and continually wretched. I heard a commotion outside and came to my feet and picked up my power pick.
“Come out, boy!” A voice called from outside. Gavias Canton’s. That was a problem. A very serious problem. You see, Gavias was a Silver as well. I considered him, my anger mounting. We both were Silvers, but I was wearing an exoskeleton and carrying a power pick. On the other hand, Gavias was a full-grown man with a firmer Foundation than mine with his wealth providing personal training, medical attention, and advancer pills to him. He also had a pack of Bronzes and even more Coppers as I peered through the flames and out the broken windows. Many of them were wielding advanced gunpowder weapons, instruments of death that could put down even a Silver if not a Gold. Could I beat all of them at once? No. Probably not. Could I rush them in a suicidal charge and kill Gavias Cantion in one blow before I was shot? Also probably not.
“What’s your choice?” I said to nobody. Try to avenge my family and die like a whimpering cur or run and live another day, my pride and honor in tatters?
I made my decision with some shame and said goodbye to my family and slipped out the back of our house into a side alley and ran. When I exited the alley into the main streets they caught sight of me and chased me and fired shots at me in volleys that buzzed past my ears and between my feet, but I was moving like a horse at full speed and leapt over the wall surrounding Illivea in my exoskeleton.
“Where are you even going?” I asked myself, miserably. I couldn’t come back to the city and the way to another city was the opposite direction, right now I was only headed towards a graveyard of starships.
It was something I supposed. A landmark from which I could plan something further or just let myself give in to the emotions that threatened to overwhelm me.
I ran into the corroded, dirty hulks of damaged and defiled star ships. What was I going to do? What could I do? Run around the whole of the city and then start for another city, hoping no one looked into who I was in the next place I went and alerted the Cantions? How would I pay for food and lodging elsewhere? All my family’s pitiable savings were in our home and that wasn’t much. It wouldn’t last for long to pay a landlord. Perhaps I could sleep on the streets? No, even in Illivea Bronze deputies cleared the homeless and the beggars away from any comfortable or safe place to sleep. It would be the same elsewhere.
I pounded further and further into the graveyard of ships. Who had decided to put all of these here? When had the first wrecks and derelicts been dropped off?
“Grrr.” A growl. A chill went up my spine and froze. Maybe it was just stray animals that were more scared of me than I should be of them.
I turned to see dogs whose legs were made of bronze and whose eyes were glowing coals. They had steel talons and bone spike horns.
“Grrr!” They were furious, ferocious things. They were born only to hate and hunger and despise and they would feel no kindness and hear no reason even if they were smart enough to understand human language as some Infernal Beasts could.
Infernal Beasts of the Underworld, brought to the surface to scratch at mankind’s civilization at the will of their chthonic master. They were Hellhounds and they were going to kill me. I was sure of it. It would take a Golden Servus to fight multiple Infernal opponents of this stage and advancement.
I readied the power pick and fought them off until one got inside my guard and raked me. As I had thought even as a Silver, I was only a Servus and these were the Hounds of Hell. They mauled me and broke bones and rent flesh until they were certain I was dead or close to it and they stalked away. Thank the gods. Must not have been hungry, must have just been guarding their territory. I was going to die out here but at least I wasn’t going to be eaten alive. The star we called Apollo after the Sunbringer shone blazingly in the one eye I could still see out of, and I crawled into the darkness of a ship out of the heat and the light, to let my life’s thread unravel. I moved on instinct more than rational thought. I wanted to die in a place that felt safe.
Something glinted in the corner of my vision. I tried to ignore it, but I could see it even when I closed my remaining eye. Like it was transmitting its image into my brain. I groaned, my popped lung hissing as I did so, and pulled myself closer to the mysterious shining object. I left a scarlet smear of blood behind me as I inched my way over painfully.
I found a case from which the light emerged and in the haze of dying I opened it. Inside was a ring with a seal of an alabaster white face in side profile with a crown of a golden laurel.
I was about to drop it and shut my eye for the last time when I heard a buzzing and then a voice.
Put me on. I can save you.
I put the strange ring on and my entire body vibrated. My wounds sealed over and knit together, restoring me to life. I felt an invisible force pick me up and begin puppeteering my body, forcing me to walk outside and raising my right hand to the sky even as I strained with my Silver body’s strength to pull back from whatever kind of possession this was.
A bolt of lightning, true lightning, not just the electrical flickering of advancement struck me as I raised the ring to the sky. I felt my skin and bones remold and reshape. The remnants of my exoskeleton that had not been destroyed by the Hellhounds exploded off of me and the wormwires spasmed out of my flesh. I felt my soul sear and something brand itself upon my spiritual aspect. I felt my nerves ignite and my muscles glow like white hot metal. I couldn’t tell if it felt painful or pleasurable but whatever it was, it was too much. Too divine, for a mere Servus to contain in their body.
This felt like ten advancements in Rank all at once. What could I possibly become from such a thing?