The icy cold of metal twisted tight around his wrists and neck served as a brutal reminder to Lekt of how far he had fallen. Here, displayed for all to see, he bowed in deference to a stone likeness of his god—not by choice, but forced by the metal stocks binding him. He didn’t dare so much as move and could barely breathe, wicked burrs of metal lining the inside of his collar and the shackles affixed to a horizontal steel beam like a trap. Crusted blood stained the metal already, his and that of the few foolish enough to walk his path before him. It always ended the same: in agony.

Not for the first time, Lekt turned the voice of infernal harshness he used when cracking a whip inwards on himself. What did you think would happen when you refused, fool? He ground his sharp teeth, still stinging from the humiliation that had shredded his back and turned him into a mewling wreck before the other prospective Chosen. You brought this upon yourself.

To refuse the Maker’s blessing, the Maker’s favor, was to spit in His face. Still, Lekt couldn’t entirely fault himself for balking before the last rites—not after seeing what became of those who underwent the change. He saw Yanna, a proud and fiery soul who felt some stirring of patience for those who toiled in the mine, savagely whipping a worker who moved too slowly at the whim of one of the Cold Ones, as if all he had known of her was erased.

No, not erased: like ore smelted and then hammered into the Maker’s favorite shape.

Then there was Bakhr, a fearless warrior and staunch ally, who had not hesitated to seize Lekt the moment he faltered, claws digging savagely into pressure points as if there was no memory of the victories and defeats they shared. Worst of all was Marhen, who wielded the scourge against his back despite how hard he tried to protect her in their training.

The Chosen knew only the will of their Maker. Who they were before they welcomed the collar mattered nothing. Lekt understood now in a way that felt so sickeningly real, even only able to perceive little except the statue’s feet with his dim, grainy vision: all that existed in the Deep answered to Him, one way or another. There was only submission or death.

He shivered in the cold air, cold-bumps forming across his broad shoulders, stripped to his waist. The muscles that had served him well in his combat training were in agony, savaged by a scourge and being forced to maintain the same reverential position that once he would have placed himself in willingly.

Was it fear or something else that stopped you?

The question seemed to come from nowhere, rising out of the depths of his mind like a specter. He recognized the sound, cold and metallic. It was the chain that bound him more than any stockade, the shackle of darkness that had driven him to almost take the Maker’s favor: the devouring maw of Void intruding into his heart. Agony lanced through him when it spoke, burning like ice inside his chest. His heart slowed, his blood cooled, and the malice of it menaced like a poison.

All his kin felt the Voice’s wicked bite inside them, from the mewling wretches who worked deepest pits of the most miserable mine to the highest reaches of the crumbling cliffs that dominated Lagarra and the overseers who walked them. Only the Chosen could suppress it, drown out the creeping madness, but their frigid Maker-given sanity was perhaps even worse.

Nearby, the cracks of the whips could still be heard, even as Lagarra settled into its normal rhythms again after his public scourging. The sharp sounds were so ubiquitous that Lekt normally didn’t even notice them, but this time his tortured back burned with a sympathetic sting. He tried to keep his mind off the cold before he started to shiver, something that would rip him to shreds on the burrs of metal already digging mercilessly into his flesh.

The sound of a soft tread approaching gave him pause. Lekt clicked slightly, creating a soundscape of echoes over the groans of workers in the nearby mines, chained to their tools. Not Marhen: too small, the size of a child. Violence had blunted his nose with breakings, but he could still smell well enough to catch a fresh scent. That and the sloshing told him someone was scurrying up the steps to his stocks with a pail of water.

“Who comes?” Raw from his cries, his voice was little better than a neglected infant’s.

“Niss,” a small female voice answered from just behind.

“Is it saltwater?” Lekt demanded, not that he could have defended himself from it if he wanted to. This one was a child, but the others had no objection to teaching cruelty young.

Niss chattered her teeth nervously. “N-no. Just water.” She skittered around to the front of him and Lekt heard something disturb the water. A moment later, a rough burlap cloth wet with brackish liquid wiped across his face, sweeping stinging sweat and blood from his brow. His cheeks were next, though Niss went so carefully over the bruises of his swollen jaw that he barely felt it.

Lekt couldn’t comprehend why anyone would risk an agonizing death just to tend to him. In Lagarra, one licked their own wounds. “Don’t be a fool.” He spoke harshly, with that same ruthless authority. “If someone sees, it will be your end. Get away.”

Niss shivered slightly in fear, but dipped the rag into the bucket again anyway. “It’s not right,” she whispered, more to herself than him. He heard her move closer again, holding the cold rag to his abused jaw. It offered some relief to the aching bruises.

The prisoner snapped his jaws menacingly, lips rolling back to expose his fangs. “Go!” He kept his voice low enough to not be heard, but filled it with his rage and pain.

“I don’t want to go,” Niss said quietly. “It’s not right what they do.”

“Do you not understand? The Cold Ones or the Chosen will come and crush you into a pulp.” Lekt had seen it happen, though rarely. There was seldom any reason for even the miserable wretches in the mine to help each other. The Maker knew how to turn them against each other, even if they could somehow overcome the Voice inside.

Niss faltered slightly. “I know,” the little one whispered, sounding so much older than she was.

“Then why?” Lekt demanded.

“It’s not right,” Niss repeated staunchly, clinging to the words for her bastion of logic.

“You speak nonsense.” Lekt’s clawed hand twitched inside the stocks as if to map her face, but the movement dragged his flesh across a sharpened spur of metal. He hissed in pain.

A smaller hand touched his, her delicate claws brushing over his scarred palms. “Not nonsense.” Niss’s voice quivered with fear, but there was a core of conviction that didn’t fade.

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“And where did you learn this, then?”

“From Thalrus.” Niss hesitated a moment before adding, “I fed him before the execution.”

Lekt growled low in his throat once he placed the name, a rumble of hatred in his chest. Of course this weakness had sprung from the captive kinslayer. Not even knowing what agony the last days of Thalrus had been was enough to soften Lekt’s virulent revulsion. “He spoke lies and you were fool enough to believe him?”

Niss touched his bruised cheek and jaw with the cold cloth again, offering some meager comfort even though it put her hand dangerously close to his fangs. “Is it a lie?” Her tremulous voice hardened into something fierce. “Do you really think this is right?”

Before Lekt could answer, he heard the scraping steps of a Cold One and his adrenaline lurched. Whatever insanity had taken root in Niss, he didn’t want to hear her die. “Run, little one!”

The bucket cracked against the floor, spilling water everywhere, but Niss only made it three steps before Lekt heard her cry in pain. He chattered his teeth so that he could hear what was going on. Just ahead of him, Niss dangled by her neck, held in the claws of a Cold One. He recognized the hunched, bulky figure with its metallic hide and crushing talons: Erzuth, the Flenser.

Metallic and inhuman, Erzuth’s voice boomed out over the platform, echoing through the streets below. “YOU DARE DEFY WHAT THE MAKER INTENDS FOR THIS WRETCH?”

Niss couldn’t answer, not with those claws almost crushing her throat.

Lekt cursed in the privacy of his own head. He needed to think quickly to save Niss. “She is nothing, Flenser,” he growled. “A wriggling worm unworthy of your time–”

“I AGREE.” Erzuth clenched its claws with a sickening crunch and then dropped Niss unceremoniously, like a discarded doll. She landed with a wet thump, head hitting separately from her body.

Just like that, the life of the only person in Lagarra to lend Lekt aid when he needed it most ended, as all things in Lagarra ended, at the merciless motion of metallic claws. Lekt shuddered and his stomach roiled, tearing open gashes on his neck and wrists. Burning hatred was a fire in his gut, perhaps the only heat to be felt this far from the infernal forges.

It came as no surprise. Soft things did not survive in Lagarra, and nothing was softer than the unfamiliar touch of a stranger soothing his wounds.

Lekt growled deep in his chest. “You didn’t have to do that. She did nothing that you could not undo, nor did she try to free me.”

Erzuth stepped between the prisoner and the Maker’s statue, blood-drenched claws seizing Lekt’s already abused jaw with bone-cracking force. “YOU FAIL TO UNDERSTAND MUCH, WORM.” The words had a purring, synthetic cruelty to them. “I MERELY OFFER YOU REMEDIAL INSTRUCTION.”

The imprisoned creature had to accept that in sullen silence, but the hate burned hotter and deeper, sinking into the deepest recesses of his bones. Lekt had never really been one to bandy words, especially with the Cold Ones. They had no living feeling one could appeal to, only sucking Void where a soul should have been. Even the Chosen were only pale imitations of the malice they could conjure. The fact Erzuth held his jaw immobile made him no more eager to speak.

The Flenser reached above him and metal shrieked on metal as the Cold One turned the gears that bound Lekt in his place. But while the captive assumed this would be yet another tightening of his collar in the stockade, instead he felt a rush of air as he was released from his binds.

His relief lasted only an instant, before Erzuth clamped manacles around his wrists. “What is this?” Lekt hissed out, nursing his now cracked jaw. The tortured bone felt even worse than the damaged flesh and the sickening smell of Niss’s coppery blood filled his senses even after Erzuth released him.

“THE MAKER IS MERCIFUL, WORM. HE HAS GRANTED YOU AN OPPORTUNITY FOR REDEMPTION.”

Lekt shuddered again, then lurched forward as Erzuth yanked the chains binding his wrists like a leash that almost pulled his tortured arms out of their sockets. The Cold One gave him no time to recover, instead striding down from the raised platform to Lagarra’s warren-like passages. It was agonizing, to be dragged beaten, scourged, and bloody across the rough stone strewn with little pieces of stone and metal flecks from the various foundries and forges. He tried to struggle to his feet several times, but Erzuth was always ready to upset his balance with a sharp jerk of the chains.

Lekt paid no attention to his surroundings. He only howled and then whimpered like a mindless beast as he endured the pain, the relentlessness of it grinding away all his futile hopes of revenge. The torment stopped only when Erzuth reached the gates of the city, great interlocking meshes of frigid steel that stood between the population of the city and the dark, vast expanse of cavern networks called the Deep.

Yanna and Bakhr waited hungrily at the gates, as if hoping they would be tossed some scrap of meat by Erzuth. Lekt’s jaw was too stiff for him to click, but his harsh, ragged breathing did more than enough to scatter sound to envision their forms in his mind, eager and ready. He slumped on the ground as a miserable wreck.

“You are fortunate, Lekt,” Bakhr rumbled, an uncanny and almost fanatical zeal in his voice. “You will be given atonement instead of the execution you deserve.”

Lekt hissed in pain as Erzuth wrenched him up to his feet. “Atonement? What task must I perform?”

“The kinslayer Marhen captured provided nothing. You will bring the Maker another, one who can divulge the answers he desires.”

The prisoner’s entire expression soured. “You mean I’ll die of my wounds in the wilds.”

Yanna shrugged, utterly indifferent to his suffering. It was hard to remember that this was one he had played with as a child for the few moments they were children, little stolen flashes of levity amidst the brutality of the whip and the confinement of chains. “Perhaps. If you survive and return with a useful kinslayer, the Maker will spare your miserable life.”

“And return me to the mines,” Lekt spat.

“You chose that. You were offered his Blessing and refused it.” Yanna’s posture didn’t budge an inch, like he was speaking with a statue. “If you refuse this atonement, your suffering will be a thing of legend.”

A part of Lekt wanted to just take the end now, but he had no desire to give them the satisfaction of dealing him death. Better to die in the Wilds. It would be less painful, for one: the Maker did not make idle threats. “How am I to know this kinslayer has the answers He seeks?”

Erzuth’s metallic hide slithered across itself as the Cold One bent down. “THE MAKER WISHES TO KNOW HOW TO UNSEAL WHAT WAS LOCKED AWAY IN THE CATACLYSM.”

Memories came crowding into Lekt’s mind in a twisted flood, icy fear overwhelming everything else. He remembered those doors, but more than that, he remembered the screams of the one who had birthed him as she was dragged up to them, into the Maker’s hands for fleshwarping. Lekt covered his ears reflexively, but the screaming continued, growing louder and louder. Every muscle in his body quivered in terror. “Not there. Not there. Anywhere but there,” he hissed.

Bakhr struck him hard across the face. The explosion of pain hit so intensely that it jarred him mercifully from the memory. “You will perform this task, Lekt, or you will find in the Forbidden City your own personal hell. Is this understood?”

Lekt’s throat knotted, the horrors of that prospect both known and terrifyingly unknown at the the same time. Since he couldn’t speak, he nodded. If he was lucky, he would die in the attempt. If not, he would bring them a kinslayer.

Anything, to stay away from that place.

“VERY WELL.” Erzuth took each manacle in its claws and twisted the steel free with a brutal ease as the gates opened. “GO.”

Lekt didn’t wait for healing or further instruction or supplies. The moment the overlapping metal gates opened widely enough for him to pass through, he fled into the dark, frigid Wilds as fast as his mangled body could take him. It was never wise to give them a second to change their minds.

Inside his chest, the Void whispered sweet nothings, promises of power and glory if he could perform the deed that was asked of him. Perhaps the Maker would be generous as well as merciful.

He never wanted to find out.