When I was a young girl, maybe just five or six years old, I loved two things more than anything. Well, maybe not as much as my parents, but as most five-year-olds are entirely dependent upon their parents I think it is fair to have loved them most of all. I loved the trees and I loved the sky.
I was raised in a small forest village called Keshin, located on the southern side of Isha and far from the Orran-Terrelan border. Through the eyes of a child who didn't know any better it seemed a busy village, but I look back now and realise it was so small with barely a couple of hundred inhabitants. We traded in lumber and fruit, and my mother weaved baskets that were distributed far and wide, but mostly Keshin kept itself to itself. I had no idea of the world that existed outside those forest borders.
Before I even knew of the Orran empire or their Sourcerers, I used to climb. I would shoot up trees so tall, from the canopy the people below would look like ants scurrying about our tiny village hive. I climbed with wild abandon and took risks as only a young child can. The danger of a fall seemed an abstract risk, at best.
I remember the first time Ro'shan passed overhead. My brother, older than me by three years and working the blacksmith's bellows, came running home covered in sweat and ash. He pointed to the sky and shouted the Rand had come. He had no idea what a Rand was and neither did I. We had heard stories of their power, the miracles they performed, but that was as far as our meagre knowledge went. Those stories did not do the truth justice. Both the Rand and Djinn are as gods to all the peoples of Ovaeris, or at least that's what they'd have us believe. If there's one thing you remember from my story, one lesson you take from it, let it be this: Gods are fucking arseholes. All of them.
After sprinting to the tallest tree in our little forest, bare feet pounding on the detritus, I scurried up the trunk and began climbing the branches. Hand over hand I went, faster than was safe and earning myself a latticework of scrapes and scratches up my arms and face. I suppose it is one of life's great ironies that children heal so fast yet do not appreciate it. It's only when we get older and a shallow bruise sticks around for a few weeks that we miss such swift healing.
The forest canopy was thick in places, with broad-leaved trees that stretched out as far as they dared. It was possible for little ones such as myself to find a place where a few leaves overlapped and sit there above the forest. I had done this before of course, but never to watch a city float by over my little village.
I remember staring up at Ro'shan and marvelling at its size and grace. It looked like a mountain turned upside down gliding through the sky. I knew, from eavesdropping on my elders, that a city larger than any terrans had ever built sat on the topside of that floating mountain, but even from my vantage point, all I could see was rock sailing across the endless blue of the sky.
Freedom. I think that is what Ro'shan signified for me back then. The freedom to go wherever the city willed. Even now I see that city and it awes me. It has no need for the borders of empires. There is no sovereignty of the sky. But these days I know it is far from free. It is as much a prison as the Pit, though a far more elegant one.
Once I was ejected from the garrison the soldiers no longer cared what I did or where I went. They left me kneeling on the rocky ground nursing a couple of new bruises and considering whether I had just done the right thing. My stomach still rumbled and my mouth still watered at the thought of the food I had wasted, and my feet made their own displeasure known at my shunning of the boots. I have been footsore many times in my life, but this was the one and only time I have ever turned down the offer of a good pair of shoes.
I considered heading upwards instead of down. The third floor was not so far from the first. I would never be able to escape, all us scabs knew just how well the entrance to the Pit was guarded, but I might have been able to catch a glimpse of sunlight. I longed to see the sky again. To remember what freedom looked like. Down in the evergloom of the Pit, you quickly forget what it is like to be able to see more than a dozen paces. You forget what the horizon feels like.
In the end, it was sheer defiance that stopped me. I would see the sky again. I would see sunlight again. But I would not go and stare up at it longingly. I would not try to content myself with stolen glances. I would earn my freedom one way or another and the sky would be my reward. Until then I decided to let my desire drive me, knowing it would only get stronger every time I was this close yet still so far away.
At the time I still held secret hopes I might be rescued. I believed the Orran Emperor was still alive. I thought he would be massing troops in secret somewhere, maybe under a forest canopy, like my home village. I believed they would come for me. Josef and I were the last of Orran's Sourcerers able to hold five Sources at once. All the others had been captured or killed before the siege at Fort Vernan. I was powerful and I was loyal. I thought that would be enough. I was an idiot, still suffering from the idealism the Orran Academy of Magic had burned into me.
I spared only a glance for the wooden lift waiting to take me back down to the main cavern. Prig was gone, but with a pull on the rope I could have signalled his friend to work the contraption and bring me back down. I hated the idea of walking back through the Trough, of skirting the Hill and watching Deko laugh and joke with his syphilitic captains. Yes, I meant sycophantic, but I'd wager both descriptions were equally accurate. I turned away from the lift and headed towards the stairs. There were other ways to reach the little cavern I shared with Josef and my team.
The stairs were not the safest of ways to move between levels. They snaked around and around as they led downward, little tunnels with steps built in. Occasionally they would open out into tunnels or caverns and the stairs would continue elsewhere. It was quiet, save for my footfalls, almost peaceful. The danger rested in the other inmates.
Everybody down in the Pit was a criminal of some sort. Many were war criminals like myself and Josef, others were Terrelans whose crimes should have earned them a tight noose and short drop. Unfortunately, the Terrelans didn't believe in execution, they preferred to sentence their criminals to a lifetime of pointless hacking away at solid rock. There were murderers, thieves, and worse, all living out the remainder of their lives underground, and some of them refused to give up their ways. It was well-known that some of those who felt the need to murder others haunted the tunnels and corridors. Prig himself had suggested never going anywhere alone, not just to me, but to all his scabs. Apparently, the slug-fucker wanted to keep the option of killing us all to himself.
Despite the danger in using the deserted stairways I continued. I think I would have welcomed someone trying to kill me after the overseer's strange compassion. A good old-fashioned struggle to the death seemed so much more straightforward and honest. Of course, I had no doubt I would have lost the struggle. Back then I didn't know how to fight without magic.
The sounds of digging never went away in the Pit. At first it was maddening. I spent many of my first days in the Pit on a knife edge, driven to anger and despair by the endless fucking sounds of metal striking rock. But after a few months, I learned to live with it. It became background noise that I no longer paid any attention to. And in many ways the noise of the constant digging became comforting. Terrans can get used to just about any adversity given long enough to acclimatise to it, but it takes some real seditious shit to make us start relying upon it, craving it. The few times the digging stopped I found my nerves fraying from the relative silence. I don't know how many teams lived down in the hole with us, but it was a lot. No matter where I went, I could hear the faint ring of picks hitting stone and hammers breaking rock. Even in the central cavern, as noisy as that was, I could always hear the digging. Or maybe by then it was just so prevalent that I heard it in my head. Now I think about it, it took quite some time, even after I was out, for the noise of the place to fade.