The days no longer blurred together for Jonathan. Instead, they melted until his life was nothing but a pool of smoking slag. He was at the center of a forge, but he wasn’t the smith. He was the piece of metal being worked. Heat, hammer, quench, repeat. That became his life, and against this hellish backdrop, he had trouble keeping track of anything, aside from his determination to live.

It wasn’t much of a life, though. It was a shadow of what he’d had in Khaghrumer which was in turn a shadow of what he’d had in Dalmarin. He was closer to the Stygia of the scriptures than anything that resembled his former life. Indeed, living deep beneath the earth and harvesting foul chemicals for the dwarves was worse than any of the punishments he’d ever heard of for Asignom or Tritus, and they were the greatest blasphemers who had ever lived.

Jonathan had long since accepted that he wasn’t here because he’d done the right thing. That was only the cause, not the reason. The reason he was here was because he had been stupid and naive. He’d thought that right and wrong had mattered more than laws and agendas. He had been wrong. Jonathan had made peace with that, though.

He had an agenda of his own now. He was going to escape, return to the surface, and reclaim his father’s title. Of course, he hoped to do that with as little bloodshed as possible, but his time in both the salt and the powder mill had taught him that a little bloodshed was unavoidable.

Every day, Jonathan snatched a few hours of sleep at a time by chilling the stone beneath him until he shivered. Then he spent a watch and a half in the sewer, as he’d come to think of it. That part had been the worst, but after he’d learned that he could heat the crusts of the formless mass of filth enough that he could bake the stone salts right out, that part became simple enough. All he was doing was accelerating what the caverns had been built for. He knew that. He could have gathered bags of the stuff, but that would have attracted too much attention and jealousy from the dwarves he was locked in here with.

Instead, Jonathan did the bare minimum. This was as much to avoid wasting energy, as to avoid any extra scrutiny. Other than the occasional bout of ridicule, the dwarves that he shared his sweltering barracks with him with mostly left Jonathan alone after the story of the troll. Even though that was the case, he still always worried he’d wake up one morning with a knife in his guts. Maybe they decided that making him suffer until his last breath was crueler than just ending his life one night with a shiv would be.

He wasn’t so sure they were wrong in that regard. Jonathan certainly wanted to die, just not as much as he wanted to live. Day after exhausting day all he did was purge his body of heat, suffer, and then do it all over again. It was a terrible dilemma, because not using his magic to channel the fire out of him would have been almost as exhausting as doing it constantly as he had been. Neither provided much respite, but the latter did allow for his continued survival.

It did something else too. The very act of relying on his magic so much made it stronger as time passed. It was like a terrible bellows. He would inhale magic and exhale fire. He didn’t appreciate it, though.

On the contrary, every day down in the deeps caused Jonathan to hate a little more. He’d spent much of his young life wondering why half of the men he’d known had held the stone men in such low esteem, but now he would have counted every last one of them a dwarf lover compared to him.

Eventually it wasn’t magic that Jonathan breathed in to keep moving. It was hate. It was an ever present miasma that Jonathan couldn’t help but breath. Even as his soul and body hardened, though, he never faltered or passed out again, much to the amazement of everyone around him.

The dwarves that he worked with knew that he could speak the stone tongue now, so they guarded their words when he was in earshot. The guards didn’t, though. They were still just as ignorant and cruel as ever, and it was from their discussions that Jonathan found out that they had a strict rule against beating him because it would be seen as interference in their regular pool.

They were betting on when he would keel over and die of heat stroke. At almost two months, he was already well over the record of any human in the deeps they’d ever heard of. That counter became his only way of tracking time. In the fugue state he lived in, it simply became impossible to track the days any other way. He had no idea if it had been a week or a month since he’d broken Brund’s nose, and that had been the only event of note since he’d been brought here.

Sometimes he spent his shifts in other ways too, but they were the rare exception. Usually that involved unloading supplies from arriving trains or loading barrels of black powder onto a departing one. He always thought it was funny that they let him close to that much raw elemental force, but each time he managed to resist the temptation to blow all of them up. There were some close calls there, of course.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

On the bad days he longed for the sweet embrace of the afterlife that such an act would surely bring, but he doubted that the gods would welcome him after such a selfish act, and he was certain it wouldn’t do enough damage to the dwarves to really change anything.

Still, on the sleepless nights, and the worst days, that was what Jonathan thought about. He couldn’t stop himself. Sometimes he could imagine the chain of explosions that lead to the cavern collapsing so clearly that he could taste it. It wouldn’t be enough, though. No matter how much damage he did, it would be an admission of defeat, and would mean forfeiting his father's legacy. That’s what kept him focused. He’d already failed the man once, and he wasn’t about to do it again.

Then one day, Jonathan was pulled from his barracks and brought to a cramped room near one of the warehouses. It was another stupid place to bring him, but apparently they’d either entirely forgotten he could wield fire, or his good behavior so far how lulled them into a false sense of security.

Either way, it didn’t matter. What mattered was the questions they asked.

“What are ye doin different,” an unnamed overseer blustered, without bothering to introduce himself.

“I’m not sure what you mean?” Jonathan asked, genuinely confused.

“For years the tests and the assets on the powder we ship have been identical, and now suddenly ye show up here, and the results start to change? Bah!” the twitchy old dwarf swore. “I ain’t one to believe in coincidences.”

“All I do is gather salts every day, just like you tell me to,” he said quietly,” trying to process the new information.

“He don’t seem too smart. You sure it’s him?” the other dwarf in the room asked the one questioning him, in the stone tongue.

“Course I’m sure, the first one blasted. How many decades we been doin this? Three? Four?” the first dwarf retorted. “I’m telling you Ogeb, he’s the one. He’s doing something to the salts he's gathering, and it’s throwing off the whole balance.”

“Well, maybe one of your machines is out of calibration, or maybe a foreman mixed the ratio wrong. Did ye think of that, ya old coot?” Ogeb shot back, clearly not as concerned.

“Ratios? Of course, I check the ratios. They’re the same as they always are. It’s...” As soon as the conversation started to get really interesting though, the dwarf suddenly stopped himself. That was clearly a secret too great to reveal in front of a human. Jonathan pretended to be bored and was looking at the floor, but clearly they’d somehow managed to feel his interest.

Instead, the first dwarf leafed through a pile of parchment before he slammed the relevant paper on the table. “It’s right there in black and white," he said, pointing at the relevant portion with a stubby finger.

That wasn’t nearly as secretive as the dwarf thought it was, though. At a quick glance, Jonathan read the paper, and was more than a little shocked by what he read. Could the recipe for dwarven black powder really be so easy, he wondered? Three fourths stone salts, one in ten parts brimstone, and the rest charcoal? That seemed remarkably simple, and Jonathan was sure there had to be a further trick to it, but he said nothing while they talked.

“So then, if it is him, what do you want to do? Ye want me to take him out of the pits and put him somewhere else for a while, Madek?” Ogeb asked, not bothering to hide his frustration. It was clear that he didn’t care one way or the other.

“Ain’t you been listening?” Madek asked exasperated. “That’s the last thing I want. I want him to tell us what he’s doin, so we can do it to all the salts.”

“The effect ye’r talking about is barely noticeable. It—” Ogeb said.

“Two percent is two percent Ogeb. Are you mad?” After Madek interrupted the other dwarf, he turned back to Jonathan and spoke once more in heavily accented Wenlish. “Ye sure ye don’t know what you might be doing different than everyone else? I could see some extra rations goin to ye if you share what you know.”

Jonathan faked a cautious smile and pretended to tell them the exact truth in excruciating detail, even though it was exactly the same thing that every dwarf on his crew did. He left out the critical step where he used magic to boil off the damp and collect salts that much faster, which was obviously the secret they were looking for. He took great joy in watching them make notes about the most trivial thing he said, hoping to garner some small clue, but Jonathan knew it would amount to nothing.

This wasn’t just for self-preservation though. He just didn’t want to give the bastards a damn thing, especially not after they had given him so much. Dwarvish powder was one of the greatest secrets in the entire world. Maybe the greatest if you didn’t count the Gods themselves, and the fools had just told him how to make it.

“Alright,” Madek said finally after having him repeat himself for the third time. “We’ll if any of this helps us find the cause, we’ll make sure ye are reward for yer contributions.” The dwarf sounded more frustrated than hopeful, though, and that suited Jonathan just fine.

As Jonathan was walked back to the sewers to put in the rest of his shift, he tried very hard not to smile. That, more than anything else, was a reason to live. He needed to escape now. Not just for his own sanity, or for his family’s dignity, but for this. He needed to share this secret with the men of the world so that they could finally throw off the shackles of dwarven slavery, and usher in a new world, because surely when everyone had their own brand, the world would finally be at peace.