Since Alistar and Kaila had met Servan, they had sought him out every other day at some predesignated tunnel or other, always in the upper mines. They were careful to change the location of their meeting place every week, so as to lessen the chances of being seen by unwanted eyes.
Servan was very interesting and fun to be around, a breath of fresh air in the stale and unchanging tunnels. He was also kind. Enough, in fact, that Alistar didn’t consider him a guard. All guards were tyrants who cared little for the slaves they oversaw. Although Servan didn’t show it in public, Alistar recognized his concern for those around him as genuine. He didn’t like that the two of them wandered through the tunnels on their own, and it was often with a frown that he spoke of their families.
Every other morning, Alistar and Kaila would give most of their porridge to their loved ones, who seemed aware of the arrangement with Servan. Once the adults went off to begin their workday, the two of them would rush to meet their new friend, who happened to have a break slotted within this timeframe. He always brought along two apples and a hunk of bread, which they would split with such eagerness that their bodies often shook from anticipation of the fresh, treasured tastes.
Alistar had never felt so fortunate. It was a situation where they were eating apples every other day, and bread, too. Real bread, not the tasteless clumps of hardened dough that the slaves were given once a year. This was food that he’d only ever glimpsed from a distance, whenever a guard felt like taunting some slaves by enjoying his breakfast within sight of the sleeping areas. The soft texture, the savoury sweetness—it was bliss. He had heard about bread and all of its variations from his father, who had often held Alistar and Kaila’s attention with stories of wonderful-sounding foods and drinks that he’d enjoyed in the past.
Every time that he ate bread, Alistar thought of his father.
Servan only ever stuck around for about half of an hour. Many guards made a habit of going on walks throughout the Long Tunnel and the other lit sections whenever they were on break. Because of this, it wasn’t uncommon to see guards strolling in ones and twos down some tunnel or other, despite the fact that there were hundreds of these natural hallways. Under this guise, Servan would meet up with them discreetly.
He did his best to entertain them with witty jokes and clever stories, but most of his time was spent answering an unending barrage of questions. Afterward, he would head back to his station, leaving Alistar and Kaila to their daily explorations.
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Following this pattern, a month had passed.
Having grown used to Servan’s company, Alistar had learned that there was no point in inquiring after his family’s origins. This was something that he was used to, though Servan’s loose responses only made him more curious about what had landed his family in Crystellum. This curiosity, however, took a back seat to the building sense of normalcy that had slowly settled in over the weeks. Thanks to the extra portions of porridge, his mother and his uncle were in better health and so too was Grandpa Talon, so Alistar’s mood was lighter as of late.
To his surprise, many of the new guards were not as crude as their predecessors. If it weren’t for the presence of the new captain, then life in the mines might have been a lesser shade of peaceful. This, of course, was the young, red-haired man that had brutally beaten Mr. Loyos to death after only serving him half of the usual portion of porridge. He had earned a reputation as the type of man who often toyed with and harmed others for his own amusement. Not two weeks after his arrival he had beaten another slave to death, a scared, wiry young man that Alistar hadn’t recognized. The captain’s presence made Alistar and Kaila more than willing to spend their days wandering through the empty tunnels instead of sitting at their families’ sides. In the past, those of such rank generally hadn’t interacted with the slaves, which set the man aside from the others in a troubling way. Even the other red-haired captains had only done so here and there.
True to his word, Servan regarded them as if they were any other slaves whenever they happened to cross paths in public, and went out of his way to avoid their family members. Although others might have been having a hard time with some of the new guards, Alistar and Kaila were more or less left alone.
Lately, the two of them had taken to tracing out crude images of things that they had never seen before, and made it a game of sorts to compare one another’s ideas of what something might look like. When it came to drawing, Kaila had much more talent than Alistar, and though this was evident every time they drew, she never once teased him for it. He’d begun to reflect upon this, because deep down he knew that he probably would have teased her if the fact of the matter was the other way around.
Kaila disliked mathematics because she lacked proficiency, so whenever Alistar practiced his numbers, Kaila would either go through her letters or draw images in the dirt. In recent weeks, these activities had taken up most of their time.
Though uneventful, this was a period of relative peace in Alistar’s life. For the first time in a long while he found that his worries weighed lighter on him, because he could rest assured that Servan wouldn’t let any harm come to his family while he was away. Months passed, with him and Kaila maintaining their distance from the goings-on of the Resident Cavern and enjoying the freedom that their time alone provided. They had gained an older-brother figure in Servan, and the health of their family members had improved. Although Alistar missed his father deeply, during this time he was truly happy. But happiness in the mines was a fleeting notion, a sobering lesson he would learn soon enough.