Chandra spent the next day entirely terrified that the master would come back and immediately deem her tainted. She went out of her way to do nothing suspicious, hoping only that her tail and posture would not give away her anxiety.

Still, the master did not show up. Work at the factory went even slower than the day before, and at times it seemed the guards were letting them rest entirely. Work eventually ended, night came, and then then it all started again--and again without sign of the master.

By that point, discipline had fallen apart entirely in the upstairs. By halfway through the day, the guards, who had all been cowed to work through constant abuse, seemed to have vanished entirely, and not long after that, most of the workers were gone as well. Chandra, however, could not physically leave until they unlocked the gate covering the staircase. They did this whenever the master came for her, and also every five days, taking the bins full of stone out and returning them empty, but that was not due soon, even if the master were here.

By evening all of the tainted workers had left, and most of the rest. Chandra was feeling more adventurous, daring to openly look at the upper level, but those that remained all had dull eyes, with no more than a tiny scrap of life, and no sign of the glow that accompanied the taint. She was happy, at least, that the man who had tried to hit her with a rock was gone. But it felt awful, too, like he had gotten away while she stayed behind.

Perhaps that was for the best. There was no escape from this place.

Slaves like them were brought here through the Starry Place, and those who could not enter the Starry Place could not leave. Somehow--she assumed it was because she was not human--she managed to stay conscious on the journey over, when the others were all bent low by some spell. The Starry Place had felt so surreal; she had floated in her cage, and felt a thousand new feelings, all twisted together. It had changed her, she was sure. If it had not changed her body, then looking up and seeing a rippling hole in the sky full of stars, stars that felt like gods, had certainly changed her understanding of the world.

She was, however, a slave. She knew exactly what her place in the world was, even if that world was wider and grander than she had ever known. As with the others, if the master deemed her unworthy, she would vanish. And knowing how the workers were treated, especially women workers, she preferred her position as one of the master’s favored ones. For her, the abuse had mostly stopped, and she was never exhausted nor starving at the end of the day.

The mental scars might not heal, but they were nothing compared to what she had seen above.

She paced the length of the pit. Collecting stones had been all there was to keep her sanity the last few months, and now even that seemed taken from her. Except, late in the day, one man started dropping a few rocks, mostly drained ones. Eagerly, she sorted them into their bins, and returned, hoping she could be of further use.

She looked up at him. He had been working at something all day, often making scraping noises inside the cauldron, which was unusual even among the many mysteries that went on above. And he was exhausted, clearly, with little hope left in him, but he seemed… unusually driven. Like many of the others, he didn’t even rise to his feet to perform his labor anymore, just dropped things over the side of the cauldron as he leaned against it, but still, he seemed eager to put a little bit of life and motion into his actions.

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He finished his last bit of work, which involved putting some rocks in the cauldron, others in his hand, and pressing his head against the side of it. It wasn’t quite the same technique she’d sometimes dared to spy upon, but she had never been told exactly what they were doing, much less how, and so she could only wonder as she let the scene soak in. After a moment, he fished a series of rocks and another ingot from the bottom of the cauldron, his hands dripping with some fluid she had been told never to touch. The rocks he dropped, and she gladly carted them off to the bins. The ingot, though, he held limply in his hands, too numb even to rap it against the wall, as the workers would when they finished. Usually, these pieces were then taken away by the guards, but there was nobody to take it.

She gestured for him to drop it, and he did, reluctantly.

Chandra had seen many things fall in her lifetime, but never before had something fallen wrong. It fell too fast, and where it impacted the ground, the stone cracked, and not a little; although she was feet away, the thin stone under her feet shifted. But the metal also bounced, a third as high as the height it was dropped and wildly off to Chandra’s left. When it struck the wall, that, too, cracked, and it bounced again, and again, less each time but still far too much.

It terrified her more than anything she had ever seen, and she fled back to her sleeping space, only emerging a good three minutes after the metal ingot had stopped making any noise.

She prodded the metal with one foot. It felt weird. Although it was very round, if long, it didn’t roll as far as it should have, even though she was sure, from the feel of it, that she had pressed harder than she meant to.

She couldn’t stop thinking about the locked gate at the end of the room, the one that blocked the stairs. This metal had cracked stone after falling only a few feet; surely it must be able to break her out of this place. But neither was she sure she wanted to try to leave. The men upstairs had fled as soon as they got a chance, but they were always fated to become tainted and die. She might have lived here for months, or maybe years, as long as the master was never displeased. And while she did some days eagerly think of her own death, she wasn’t in such a mood now.

She looked up at the man who had made the strange metal. He had three lengths of metal on him, suddenly--one in each hand, and one cradled against his chest. Now that she looked, she thought she could see a faint sheen each; they must also have been made into the strange bouncing demon-metal he had dropped. Chandra felt sure he must have rushed their production with a sense of desperate urgency, as he had barely been able to move just moments before. For a moment, she felt cheered; the master must be pleased about this, and then, perhaps, there would be no abuse, or very little. Perhaps what was coming would be redemption, not disaster.

But after a moment of hope she understood the awful murmur coming from his throat, recognizing it as slow, pained laughter. She looked, seeing as though for the first time his eyes; they were blank and lifeless, with no mark of taint but also no sign of humanity, and he looked as though he could not even see anymore. On his face was a grimace, one that spoke of a man about to do things so terrible that only a broken man would even think of them.

He turned and hobbled away, cackling with a voice that seemed like it had not been used in a long time. Chandra chased him as far as she could, peering through the gaps in the floor above, but it was soon clear that he, like the rest, had left. And, she was certain, he was not going to find the master and deliver the ingots.

This was quickly confirmed when the screams started, and then the sound of smashing stone.