Chương 10: Promise

"It's water," Lere said, staring at the pool like he didn't quite believe it. Confusion and relief fighting for space in his voice at the same time. Solstice watched it too. Every nerve in his body screamed at him to dive in headfirst and drink until his stomach gave out. He knew better. He'd known better his whole life. Someone clicked their tongue. Murren turned his back on the water.

"Just my luck. I run out of Pale Salt to work magic, and now water shows up." He said it flat, like the universe had personally arranged the insult. The masked man stepped forward.

"But maybe it isn't poisoned with blight?"

"Are you nuts?" Murren snapped.

"But—""Were you born yesterday? Every drop of water in this godforsaken cold hole is poison. All of it. Always has been."

"Then go drink it first." Murren's voice dropped, almost pleasant.

"I'll gladly watch you die." The masked man's mouth shut.

'He's right, though.' Solstice's eyes stayed on the pool.

'Every drop of water in this world carries blight. There's no such thing as clean water. Not anymore.' A sound reached them from somewhere past the reach of the lamps. A whisper. Not words. Not quite. Breath shaped into something like syllables, drifting out from the far end of the chamber where the light gave out and the dark just kept going, deeper than any of their lamps had tried to reach. Everyone went still.

"Did you—" Lere started.

"Quiet." Murren's hand went up. They waited. The sound didn't come again. Or maybe it did, so faint nobody could swear to it, swallowed back into the dark before it finished whatever it had been saying. The masked man broke first. He dropped to the ground, knees hitting stone hard enough that Solstice heard it, hands pressed flat over his own mouth like he could physically hold the sound in. It didn't work. A thin, cracked whisper leaked out between his fingers anyway, over and over, the same three words.

"We're going to die. We're going to die. We're going to—" He caught himself mid-word and clamped his jaw shut, shoulders shaking, tears cutting clean tracks down a face otherwise caked in dust and old blood. Nobody moved to comfort him. Nobody knew how. Solstice watched him fall apart and felt something colder than pity settle in instead.' None of this adds up.' He'd never been on an expedition before this one, had no baseline to measure it against, no older miners' stories to compare it to. But Lere had.

Five expeditions, he'd said. And Lere's face, every time something new crawled out of this mountain, had looked exactly like a man watching the rules he'd trusted his whole life quietly stop applying. A dweller that hunted salt instead of flesh. Uron sitting in a Pale Salt vein where it had no business being. Ice the wrong color, air too thin to breathe, giant black things with wings that shouldn't exist anywhere warm-blooded things did.

And now water, sitting untouched in a cavern nothing should have left untouched, with something whispering just past where the light gave up. None of it was normal. Even the ones who should know better didn't know what this was. Lere sat down beside him a while later, voice quieter than Solstice had heard it since the surface.

"Can I ask you something?"

"You're going to anyway."

"Have you ever heard of the legend?" Solstice looked at him.

"Legend?"

"Well.. not really a legend. But it's one of those those stories thatNameless kids grow up hearing. Most of us, anyway." Lere tipped his head back, looking up at the ice crystals catching what little lamplight reached them.

"That if you give your whole heart to the gods of Domains, really give it, not just pray at them when things get bad, they share their warmth back. A gift. Proof they noticed you." Solstice said nothing.

"It's embarrassing to admit now," Lere went on, smiling like the memory cost him something.

"But I used to believe it. That the gods reached down for people like us especially. Nameless kids nobody else bothered looking for." A beat.

"Do you believe in gods, Sol?" Solstice let the question sit before answering.

"No."

"I see."

"If they exist," Solstice said, "I guess they forgot I exist." A pause.

"That's rude of me, actually. Let me fix that." His voice didn't change, flat all the way through.

"They forgot we exist. Everyone still crawling around in this sunless hole just trying to see tomorrow." Lere watched him, waiting.

"Tell me something, Lere. Would a merciful god, the kind you just described, sit still and watch his faithful little follower eat what was left of his own mother's corpse?" Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! The silence that followed had weight to it. Lere opened his mouth. Closed it again.

"So, no." Solstice looked back at the water.

"I don't think gods like that exist. Maybe something's up there. But it doesn't care." Neither of them said anything for a while after that. It was the masked man who broke it, lurching upright with a pickaxe gripped in both shaking hands, already swinging it toward the nearest salt vein like the sound of steel on stone might drown out whatever was still crying in his own head. Lere moved before Solstice's mind caught up to what was happening.

He tackled the man sideways, both of them hitting the ground in a tangle of limbs, the pickaxe skittering off across the ice.

"Are you insane?" Lere hissed, pinning him down.

"You want every mongrel in this mountain to hear that?"

"I can't—" The masked man's voice cracked apart entirely.

"I can't just sit here and wait to die quietly, I can't—""Then we do it slow." Lere kept his voice low, urgent.

"Small strikes. Enough to space them out so it doesn't carry."

"That'll take all night," Murren said from where he sat, not bothering to open his eyes.

"You have a better plan?" Murren didn't answer that. Solstice looked between them, Lere's desperate logic, the masked man's shaking hands, Murren's refusal to commit to anything that might cost him effort he didn't have left, and decided none of them were going to land on an answer before someone else fell apart. He dropped to his knees beside the nearest salt vein and started licking it.

"What—what are you doing?" Lere's voice cracked with the question.

"What's it look like." Solstice didn't lift his head.

"Getting salt."

"You know that's not going to charge your Saltis fast enough, right? You need forty grams, minimum. Licking it is going to take all night."

"Do we have a choice?" Solstice hissed the words out between passes of his tongue. Silence settled over the cavern. It broke with a weak, wheezing chuckle. Murren, watching him, the sound building slowly into something closer to real laughter, blood-pale lips stretched thin.

"You goddamn rat." Murren shook his head.

"You're pathetic. Truly." Solstice kept licking. He didn't look up. Didn't bother wasting the energy on a curse, not even in his own head. All he let himself think about was the taste. Salt. Metal. Filth ground into every groove of the stone. Disgusting, all of it. But desperation ran hotter than disgust ever could. Every cell in his body was screaming the same single word, over and over. Survive. Live. Even here. Even in this frozen grave of a place.

The masked man dropped to his knees a moment later and joined him, tongue working against the salt with the same grim focus.

"You don't have to," Solstice said, not looking at him.

"Neither do you." The masked man's voice came out rough, cracked at the edges.

"Doesn't stop either of us, though, does it." Solstice almost bit through his own tongue at the sight of it. From anywhere outside this cavern, this would've looked insane. Two grown, well, one grown, one barely, people on their knees, licking rock like starving dogs. He understood exactly how far people would crawl to keep breathing. He'd known that fact longer than most. Lere stood off to the side, arms crossed, unmoving, clearly unsure whether joining them or staying upright made him the smarter one.

Murren stayed seated, still chuckling under his breath, one hand pressed loose against the wound crusted dark across his ribs. Solstice's tongue split somewhere in the third or fourth pass, thin lines of blood mixing into the grit and salt already coating his mouth. He kept going anyway. Heat crept back into his chest, slow, cruelly slow, one pathetic degree at a time. He kept licking. Then Murren stood, boots scraping stone, and crossed the space between them.

"Here's how this works." He crouched down to Solstice's level.

"You three worthless pieces of trash lick that salt for me, and purify the water so we can all drink. Notice what I said. We. That's a privilege, considering what you actually are." Solstice stopped licking and looked up at him.

"You know that once our Saltis unfreezes, we can use magic on you too. Right?" Murren's eyes found the pale green ones staring back at him, unwavering, streaked with dirt and dried blood, set into a face too young and too frail to be looking at him like that. He leaned in close, close enough that Solstice caught the rot on his breath, close enough to see his own bruised reflection warped across the surface of Murren's goggles.

"I'd like to see you try." Solstice's mouth curled up at one corner.

"You're pretty confident I won't kill you."

"Because you can't." Solstice held his stare. Didn't blink. Let the silence stretch a beat longer than it needed to before he spoke again.

"Promises aren't something a nameless runt like me is allowed to make." He kept his eyes locked on Murren's, and the corner of his mouth crept up again, slow, into something crooked and mean and not quite a smile.

"But I can make sure I'm the last thing you see." Murren didn't grin. Not right away. He stared instead, something behind his eyes going still and quiet, like he'd only just noticed what he was actually looking at. This wasn't a threat from someone who thought he could win. There wasn't a plan behind those eyes, no calculation of odds, no bluff waiting to be called. The grin came slow, finally, thin and humorless.

"Good." Murren straightened, turning his back on all of them again.

"Now lick. You dog."' Murren needs us.' That was the first useful thing Solstice had learned since waking up. The one-armed monster could kill him. Easily. But he couldn't purify the water. He needed them. All because he was so convinced that standing at the top meant everyone beneath him existed only to obey. Solstice almost laughed.' Fine.' If that's what he wanted to believe, Solstice would let him. He'd be the dog. He'd crawl when told to crawl. He'd bite when told to bite.

He'd bare his teeth when his master wasn't looking. Because a dog was harmless. Until it sank its teeth into the hand holding its leash.' Alright, Murren.'' I'll be the dog you want.' Solstice lowered his head and pressed his tongue against the salt again.' But dogs bite.'