Ash and Chains

[DYBIL]

They say memory fades with time, that the oldest wounds heal beneath newer scars. But I remember it all. The smell of the muck. The iron heat of shackles on bare skin. The serpent hisses echoing throughout the corridors of the Overseers' domes. Time has dulled many things in me—compassion, perhaps, or hope—but not memory.

I was born into slavery. Not taken, not bought. Born. That meant no name but the one your owner gave you, no rights, and certainly no future. My mother named me in secret, whispering "Tashor" like a blessing in the dead of night, when even the Watchers' eyes blinked closed. Sadegar, she said, was the name of my father. She was killed not long after I could begin standing on my own feet. Burned for hiding food meant for her sick friend. I saw it all. Smelled it all. That scent, the stink of burning flesh, never left me. Even now, years and Rings away, it ghosts the edges of my sleep.

I learned early not to speak unless spoken to, not to look the Overseers in the eye, and never, never to show anger. The serpents fed on defiance. They adored breaking the spirit more than the body. They made you praise your own suffering, made you thank them for your chains. And we did. Gods forgive us. We did.

I remember the time during a cold season. I was cleaning one of the pits with a boy we called Pips, barely older than me, but sharper, braver. We called him that because of all his pipe dreams and hopes. Pips for short. He told me stories. Those pips of his. That beyond the our cages and past the Ringwalls there were places where no one wore chains. I laughed at him then, bitter and cracked, the way only children who've seen too much can laugh. He slapped me. Not in anger, but in urgency. "Believe," he whispered. "Or they already own your soul."

Pips didn't last long after that. One of the Wardens found a carving knife hidden under his straw mat. They didn't even ask why. I never saw him again. I stopped laughing after that.

Time passed. My body grew faster than the others. Hard labor, poor food, beatings. The usual inheritance of our kind. Only thickened my limbs and tightened my will. I was picked for the forge pits by the time I was old enough to stand in places other than my feet. A place where the serpents trained their slave-soldiers. They carved us into weapons. Some broke. Some bled. Some survived. I endured.

I won't bore this page with every bloodstained detail. You can guess most of them. But I will tell you this—my freedom wasn't given. It wasn't bought. It was taken, in fire and fury.

[DYBIL]

I see him still in the back of my mind. Hear the clinking of his bone rings. His presence lingers as if carved into the marrow of me. Overseer Xharrak. Scaled tyrant of the pits.

He was tall. Not in the way men are tall, but the way serpents coil upward to remind you that you are prey. His hide was a mottled bronze-green, patterned in jagged bands. Bone rings hung from the spines that jutted from his brow ridge and along the length of his tail, clinking softly as he moved. His slitted eyes were narrow, sulfur-colored. Seeming to never blink and always watching.

His mouth never closed fully. There were too many teeth. Not jagged, not wild. Precise. Like tools shaped for butchery. When he smiled, you felt it in your spine, a ripple of remembered pain. His voice was dry and rasping, like a knife dragged over stone. He did not shout. He suggested, and his suggestions carried the weight of absolute authority.

He wore no armor. He didn't need it. His scales were thick as chainmail, and his presence made your blood forget how to circulate. Across his chest were ritual scars, deliberate burns in Sibilant runes.

I remember watching him lash a man's face open for looking too long. I remember how he held the whip like an extension of his will. Graceful. Efficient.

When he passed between the slave cells, silence followed him. Children stopped crying. The bravest of us folded inward. You learned to breathe differently when Xharrak was near. Shallower. Slower. Anything to avoid drawing his gaze.

I remember when I fought for the first time. A pit duel. No weapons. Just bare fists and bloodied teeth. He watched from above, unmoving, silent, as I shattered the other boy's nose. The sound made Xharrak's tongue flicker. That was his sign of pleasure. A slow taste of the air.

He didn't need chains to bind us. He was the chain. He was the silence before pain, the fear that outlived bruises.

How I wish I would have slit his throat in the chaos of that night. How I longed to see those sulfur eyes go wide for the first and last time.

[DYBIL]

It began not with a cry for freedom, but whispers in the muck.

There had been rumors. Voices carried on the backs of exhausted slaves and half-spoken by drunken Watchers who never imagined their servants could listen and think. War had come to their Empire. The Watchers in the pits muttered about a march to distant Rings. About being left short-handed.

We felt it. Fewer guards. Fewer whips cracking. Less food, but less oversight. It was our first breath of air.

The pits were still hellholes of muck and blood but suddenly we had room to move. The schedule slackened. We were left unguarded for minutes at a time. That's all it took. Minutes.

It was Olghen, an old man the Masters kept around because he had the medical skills to keep us barely breathing, who first brought the idea forward. Not aloud. None of us were that stupid. But with a glance, a nod, and a stolen nail driven into a bed post in a way only trained eyes could spot. I thought he was mad. Rebellion had been tried before. Always failed. Always led to public executions and tighter leashes.

But this time... This time was different.

We didn't need many. Just enough. The ones who cleaned the pits. The ones who worked the kitchens. The ones who still had some fight left in them. We'd seen each other bleed in the pits for sport, seen who hesitated and who didn't. Who held their strikes, and who made them count. Trust was already there. We just had to name it.

Over a dozen nights we stockpiled blades. Scraps of iron shaped like tools, sharpened to a kill. A short sword smuggled out beneath a dying slave's body.

We timed it for the seventh night of the red moon, when the serpents held their feast and drowned themselves in venomwine. Only four guards would be watching the pits. We were over eighty.

The signal was a dropped ladle.

It hit the ground with a clang. Harmless, mundane. And then hell burst open.

I don't remember the first Master I killed. Only the heat. The screaming. The chaos. Smoke everywhere, thick and acrid, mixed with blood and torchlight. One of the Watchers tried to blow the alarm horn, but Olghen tackled him from the rafters, cracking both their necks when they hit the ground. I held the short sword in both hands and carved my way to the gate.

There was no honor in it. No strategy. Just rage and necessity. We'd lived too long as ghosts in our own flesh. Tonight, we would live as men. Or die as them.

We broke the gate by sheer force. Bodies slammed into it until the hinges cracked, until the wood splintered and the iron bindings snapped. We spilled out into the canyon road like a tide of fire and smoke. Alarms were sounding behind us. Horns. Screams. But no army came. They were gone. Off fighting their distant war. And we ran.

Many of us didn't make it. I remember their names, but I won't write them here. Not yet. They bought our freedom with their lives. That debt weighs heavy, and I'm not done paying.

We ran, making for the next Ring, barefoot and bloodied, hunted by pursuers and beasts alike. I didn't sleep. Barely drank. But I didn't stop. None of us who made it did. We were beyond exhaustion. We were fury on legs.

That night, when I first looked at the stars without iron around my wrists, I cried. Quietly. Bitterly. For Olghen, for Pips, for my mother, for the ones who didn't make it. For the all that was stolen from me.

But I swore something then, beneath those distant stars.

I would never have shackles forced upon me again.

The shackles left scars. Not just on the flesh. On the soul. You learn to it's hard to shake them off the inside even after they're long broken. I still wake at night expecting to see that serpent bastard standing over me, or Pips whispering stories from a world that never was.

Let the serpents rot. Let their ziggurats crack and fall.

[DYBIL]

Freedom did not taste sweet.

It was dry, cracked lips and blistered feet. It was half-dead men limping across the muck, skin peeled by sun and thorns, eyes wide with suspicion. Freedom was survival. Raw, thin, and uncertain. We were no longer slaves, but we were not yet men. Not in our own minds. Not in the eyes of the world. We were ghosts, scarred and staggering, used to the cruelty of the pits but unfit for the cruelty of the Rings.

It was two days after our escape when the Ringrunners found us. Or perhaps they let us find them.

Their armor shimmered with magical oils, their blades clean but well-used. One wore a banner stitched with the image of a flame-pierced gauntlet, another bore a scroll case tied to his waist with a silk cord. They smelled like smoke and campfire and oiled steel. Adventurers, yes, but more than that. Pilgrims. Seekers of the King's Keep, that unreachable myth at the heart of the world.

We raised our makeshift weapons when they approached. They didn't draw theirs.

A woman approached us first. She was tall, with silver-threaded braids and a rough voice that carried command. She looked over us and said, "You broke your own chains. That's more than most ever try. Come with us, if you've the will for the long road."

Her name was Kelhara. She led the Scorched Hand, a fellowship of what I'd come to learn was a product of the Blade Boom. Mercenaries, they admitted, but not vultures. They had rules. They had purpose. They all had stories of their own. Not the same as ours, but experience enough to understand why we flinched when a hand moved too fast, or why some of us still slept in corners like dogs.

Kelhara gave us shelter. Food. Clean water. A fire each night. She spoke to us not like broken things, but like men who'd survived something unspeakable and deserved to name themselves again.

I became a shadow to a man named Velmir, a scribe-warrior, a rarity amongst Ringrunning mercenaries. He carried scrolls and ink and never let a story die unmarked.

He taught me to read and write.

It started with names. Mine, first. Then his. Then "Ring" then "King." I traced letters into the muck, into bark, into scraps of cured hide. My tongue stumbled on foreign glyphs, but I refused to falter. For the first time, I was mastering something no blade could grant me.

The others, the ones who escaped with me, drifted over time. Some joined Kelhara's ranks. Others found new causes, vanished into distant settlements, or died in skirmishes on the road. Freedom was no shield against fate. But I remained. I had no home. No purpose. Only the need to go forward, to the center, to something greater than the pits I left behind.

That path led us eventually to the Ash.

We crossed into it like ghosts walking into a pyre.

Kelhara warned us: "This place unmakes the weak. It burns memory. It saps meaning. But if you cross it, you come out changed. Or not at all."

I believed her.

The heat was worse than anything I'd known. It was not just physical. It was in the spirit. Every step sank into sand that clung like regret. The sun was merciless, but it was the silence that undid most. No birds. No insects. No wind. Only our own breaths, ragged and shallow, and the sound of ash whispering against armor.

One night, we found the ruins of a temple, half-buried, hollowed out. There were carvings on the stone. I read them, slowly. "Here was our sanctuary. Here we wept."

I wept too.

But I didn't break.

I did not count the days of our journey across the Ash. We lost one, a man named Sanneth. He wandered too far from camp one dusk, chasing a mirage of water. We never found his body.

As we crossed the dunes, we saw the shimmer far in the haze. A city of spires, alive with trade and banners and sound. Ba'zeel.

It looked like possibility.

Like the beginning of a life not defined by chains, nor even by escape.

And there, we were denied.

[DYBIL]

Ba'zeel was meant to be our breath.

A place to rest, sharpen blades, refill waterskins, and taste something resembling normalcy after our long journey.

But we never reached the gates.

What greeted us was a shimmer. Not light, not wind. Something subtler. Like oil spreading across glass. A wavering veil hanging, barring any from further approach. There was no sound, no blast of magic. Just a presence.

A boundary set by magic. No matter how we tried, none of us could pass it.

We camped there for three days, the Scorched Hand stretched thin around cold fires and hollow hope. We kept watching the ward, as if it might open, as if the barrier might fade. It never did. The city was so close. We could envision braziers lit up at night, silhouettes on the parapets, flags shifting in the wind. People lived there. Ate, traded, prayed.

But we were not among them. We never would be.

The camp grew quieter each night. What we'd fought to become. Survivors, mercenaries, something more than what we'd escaped, was unraveling. Not from violence. From stillness. From being turned away.

Some wept quietly when they thought no one was listening. Some argued about what to do next. A few stared at the barrier with the same look I once saw in the eyes of pit-slaves. Hope shrinking into disbelief.

Kelhara said nothing for a long time. Then, on the morning of the fourth day, she stood at the edge of the ward and said, without turning to us:

"This is not a wall. It is a mirror. It shows us what they think we are."

She did not speak the words, but I heard them in my heart. That we were unworthy.

She turned back, cloak snapping in the wind. "But we know better."

We moved on. Most followed. Some didn't. Others went their own way. Kelhara watched them go. She didn't try to stop them. She only said, "We are a blade. Blades grow dull if they're buried." I don't blame the ones who stayed behind, sitting in the ash and staring at the barrier like it owed them something. Maybe it did.

I walked. Not because I had hope, but because there was nothing left behind me.

We became leaner. Fewer. But sharper.

The Scorched Hand changed after that. Not just in number, but in spirit. We no longer followed a path to the King's Keep. We had to find a new path because there was nothing else. We had been told, in no uncertain terms, by a wall made of magic.

You are not welcome here. You will not be allowed to belong.

So we carried that truth like a torch. Through the wind. Through the ash. Toward a place uncertain.

And behind us, Ba'zeel's shimmering wall remained. Untouched. Untouchable.

[DYBIL]

We were the Scorched Hand.

Not a name chosen for glory, nor given by friend or foe. It was Kelhara's own words, spoken at the edge of Ba'zeel, after we'd turned from the barrier that reminded us:

"We are a hand burned, not broken. Still reaching. Still grasping."

We turned from the city like men and women cast from paradise. But what paradise had we expected? Ba'zeel had shown us what the world thought of survivors like us. We weren't symbols of triumph. We were reminders. Reminders of failure. Of what crawls out from the Rings and does not die.

The King's Keep no longer called to us. Whether myth or monument, it had become too far, too faint. A dream for times to be forgotten. The Scorched Hand needed something real. So we returned to the vast desert.

Not out of hope. Out of purpose.

We took coin where it was offered, bartered where we must, fought off what others feared to face.

We became hardened. Not cruel. Just sharpened.

We lost five more in one night. Velmir among them. A pack of dunecats ambushed us, their eyes glowing with the fever of hunger. Velmir was ripped apart, scroll still clutched in one dismembered hand. I remember the smell of flesh upon the pyre, this time different from the time my mother was burned, and the way Kelhara knelt beside the pyre in silence, drawing circles in the ash.

"We do not mourn in screams," she said. "We remember in silence."

We were sixteen after that. Then twelve. Then nine. An ill omen, some would say.

Something changed in Kelhara. She still led, but her gaze began to drift. She stopped speaking of the Keep. Stopped drawing in the ash by firelight, as she used to. Maps, symbols, half-memories of a path none of us had seen. Her sword arm never faltered, but her voice did. Sometimes she'd wake at night and walk into the dark alone, returning just before dawn, her eyes hollow.

There were things buried in the Ash: broken caravans, ancient vaults, shattered shrines where wind still whispered dead prayers. And then came those cursed ruins.

Ruins half-swallowed by sand, its domes shattered, its bones twisted by time. Whispered rumors of relics buried there. Sigils that could unbind souls, or dispel the wards like that which blocked the way to Ba'zeel. We were hired to clear it. Guide a scholar through the rubble. One job. One promise of coin and a chance at a dream.

What we found were not relics. It was a wound. A scar opened to some twisted terror.

I don't remember all of it. Something went wrong. The ruins breathed. Shadows moved. A voice whispered. Not in words, but wants. I remember screaming. Steel on steel. Someone calling my name. Then fire.

When I woke, I was alone.

Just me. My blade. The Ash.

I searched for them. For days. For weeks. Traced footsteps that vanished. Found signs of battle, but no bodies. A broken pendant Kelhara once wore, half-buried beneath a cairn of black stone.

The Scorched Hand was gone.

I do not know if they all died in those ruins, or if the desert swallowed them whole. Maybe they found something and fled without me. Maybe they became something else entirely.

But I lived.

I walked with no purpose but to keep walking.

Until I reached Ephia's Well.