I did well as a glazier apprentice. I got meat twice a week, fruits even every day. Not the fallen and rotten ones that appeared in piles early in the week in the ghettos. These were freshly picked, juicy.

I always hid a little bit of everything in my mantle and secretly took it home. My mother's eyes lit up every time I dumped the food on the table, even though she never took anything. She left her share to Gedeon. And so, years later, I saw how his protruding bones disappear under the skin and his face looks healthier.

Life passed lazily. I learned to work with black sclenite every day in the workshop. Every time I had a chance to caress its shiny surface, looking for any flawed parts, the mineral would sing its magical song and every cell in my body would vibrate. It was as if the stone was asking me questions and my body was answering. It was indescribable. I began to understand why lapidaries don't complain about their work. In those years, I was convinced that there could be nothing more beautiful in the world than the harmony of the glazier's soul with the stone and the energy trapped in it. I looked forward to going to the workshop every morning and left it in the evening with regret. In the presence of the sclenite, the master and friends, I forgot about the scary world behind the walls of the workshop.

At first, I just watched and did simple jobs, just like any other apprentice. Sclenite lapidaries had their assistants. Most of them were children under the age of ten who had not yet started their future work. The polizor, or grinding wheel, had to be turned by human power. That was my first duty in the workshop. I patiently pressed the bellows with air for many months, watching the hands of the experienced and trying to learn as much as possible.

When a lapidary was in a good mood, he gave me some of his time so that I could inspect the polizor. I have never seen anything so complicated before or since. The polizor resembled a wheel only in the evening when the lapidary left the workshop and folded the tool. The sclenite grinder was actually a jumble of wheels of various sizes. Especially those that were hardly visible. It was with these that the lapidary could grind hard-to-reach places in the stone. Only he himself knew which of the one hundred and eighty-three wheels was the right one. When one of the older lapidaries explained to me in more detail when exactly which one is used, I got a headache. All of them were covered in sclenite dust.

The first rule I had to learn, and even repeat out loud several times to instill it in me, was to not touch the polizor while the wheels were in motion. The polizor did not hurt. The polizor cut bones in the blink of an eye.

“Before you even exhale your hand will be rolling on the ground. Is it clear?” the lapidary scared me and I nodded in shock, my eyes glued to the floor where I imagined my severed hand in a pool of blood. It took me a long time to get that image out of my head.

For the moment, I was grateful to only look after the funny bubbles attached to the polizor by a long tube. There were five of them in total. And again, it depended on the lapidary which one of them I had to press. So my hands were safe for now.

When I wasn't helping them at work, I sat with the master and other apprentices in his study and listened intently to the explanation about sclenite.

Master Agadon was an excellent teacher. Patient, calm, excited about my every new success. Years spent in the workshop among novices taught him the art of explanation. Nevertheless, over the decades, the joy of constantly repeating stories about the mineral, without which glaziers could not breathe, did not fade away from him. During the moments when he could initiate an apprentice into the secrets of the stone, the small eyes behind his glasses widened and lit up, as if he was imparting his knowledge for the first time. Considering my young age, he might have given me more attention than others. Still, I never felt any resentment from other apprentices.

Four new lapidaries joined the workshop that year. We each came from a different ghetto. For the first time in my life, I could see that the cruel treatment of glaziers occurs everywhere. We have all experienced the same sad stories. Each of us has lost a loved one in the mines.

Bazil, a boy with a clean face but a scarred body, from the Leeval district at the opposite side of town, lost his father in the mines. One day two years ago, he did not return and the mother was briefly told that there had been some sort of explosion in the mine and her husband had perished there. Bazil's father's body was left lying in the rubble. No one bothered to bring him to the surface.

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Kastor had it even worse. He was left alone with his mother. Although only a few years ago he had three siblings, two brothers and one sister, none of them were alive. They all ended up at the border.

Davor’s sister, who was born infertile, was twelve years old when one day she didn't wake up. She had only worked in the mines for two years.

These were the stories we exchanged in private, without the presence of the master. All three were over seven years old. Bazil was almost ten. The gift came to him later. He was extremely happy because in a few months he was to leave to work in the mines. His face was flawless. Although nature was kind to his face, it took its toll on his body, including his ability to father more glaziers and thus delay his retirement to the mines.

I was the youngest. The other boys were strangely considerate of my young age. Their own suffering has taught them compassion.

The variety of our mantles enchanted me right from the start. The first time I saw glaziers from other ghettos was when Gura Elmar brought me to the master. At that time, I only took a glimpse at the differences in glazier clothes. Now I finally had the opportunity to look at them properly. I was mainly surprised by the design differences.

“This is to let everyone know which ghetto you come from,” the master explained when I asked him about it. "It's about who owns you and who takes care of you."

My mantle was dark gray with a brown stripe running down my back. It was actually a circle of rough fabric with a hole for the head right in the middle, which was easy to don. The wide hood was put on separately.

Basil's mantle was the deepest red I had ever seen. He must have been glowing even in complete darkness. It consisted of two long, differently cut strips of cloth, in which poor Bazil had to wrap his whole body, including his head, every morning.

Kastor's mantle had the most pleasing colors. It was partly dark blue and partly light brown. The suit was even sewn. It was worn like a stema, with sleeves and a hood that fell over his face.

The last apprentice Davor’s mantle was simply black. Its cut was similar to mine, except that a long hood with a pointy end, which reached down to Davor's bare feet and often made him trip over, was sewn to the head opening.

None of us wore shoes. Not even experienced lapidaries. Even though they had a higher social status, they had to walk barefoot. High shoes with firm soles were worn only by the master, as he told us, and the only ones allowed this privilege were listeners.

However, when the guards started picking us up at the entrance to the ghetto in the morning, our suits had changed. They sewed a strip of blue cloth to each of us on the mantle. I used to believe that only glaziers without mantles working in the army or in the pits had to wear this sign of glazier origin to be recognisable.

"It's because every day you leave your ghettos and walk through the center of the city," master Agadon explained again. "Even if there's a guard with you, people on the streets need to know you can leave your home."

"But the munts don't have them," I warned him.

This was one of the few times the master looked down at me with an angry look.

"We don't call glaziers munts," he rebuked me. “They are muntglaziers or just glaziers, Ilan. The munts are what the lowlanders call us, and that's not nice of them. And they don't wear a blue stripe because it's unnecessary. Like you, they are taken away from home and brought back every day, but they don't go through the center of town. They lead them through the suburbs to the gate so they don't get in the way of the lowlanders. Amaria has a total of four gates. In the south, there's the main gate that leads to Rezil, our southern neighbor, the north gate leads to Fresen, and then there are the East and West gates. They are mainly used to transport glaziers to the mines. They are smaller and not used much for other purposes.”

"How big is Amaria?" Bazil wanted to know.

The Master looked up at the ceiling and thought. "Amaria is the largest of the seventeen sclenite-making cities, Bazil, and lies roughly in the middle of the Duval Mountains. It is the ninth city from both north and south. More than two hundred thousand glaziers live here in thirty-two ghettos. About ninety thousand people came from the lowlands, and the rest, less than twenty thousand, are the army. But those are just my guesses. I don't know the exact numbers. Amaria has eight bridges, sixteen squares, and dozens of palatuls.”

All those numbers were running through my head. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't imagine so many people. I have never seen any of the eight bridges, nor the mentioned squares. I never even had the chance to see the Azaru River flowing through Amaria. In our ghetto, there was only a dirty stream, which dried up quite often in the summer months, and whose banks were connected by a few flimsy footbridges. It was actually our only source of water.

I listened carefully to the master so that I wouldn't miss anything from his explanation, but I lowered my head because I was still ashamed of the wrongly chosen word. A mere second later though I barked out another question.

"And why blue?"

The master blinked bewildered, his eyes reflecting the size of all of Amaria, repeating my question in his head.

"The color blue is an important part of the history of sclenite. The people of the lowlands have adopted it as a kind of symbol,” he continued as his hands waved restlessly in all directions. “But we'll get to that, Ilan. Everything is fine. Everything is fine."

I had to admire one thing about the master that I and the other glaziers were not capable of. He felt no hatred towards the people of the lowlands. He always spoke of them respectfully, never slandering them nor encouraging us to do so. I had no idea if he was that happy with his life or if he had resigned himself to his fate and accepted it as it was. Or if he was waiting for us to make up our own minds. He did not obey the faya or the guards. He knew the fate of the glaziers very well. Yet he never showed hatred or compassion. He scolded me when I called the glaziers munts. But so did he scold Basil, when he once said he'd rather send all the people of the lowlands to the other side of the shield into the poison clouds.

I didn't know the truth then. If so, maybe I would see it differently.