The Undying Emperor [Grand Conquest Fantasy]

To the esteemed Warden P. Engval,

My name is Michael Redmont, and I have been delivered to your jurisdiction in the penal labor camp known as The Western Copper Mine. I am writing to you because the conditions of my confinement make it impossible for me to serve my sentence. When the magister condemned me to forced labor, I was able to console myself with the fact that Skaldheim is a land of free men and just laws, that I had not been sentenced to death. It is true that there are worse fates that could have befallen me, but I fear that there is no end to my punishment that I can achieve.

I was sentenced to a thousand days of labor, for the crimes of witchcraft, blasphemy, and espionage. Upon arrival to The Western Copper Mine, however, I learned that prisoners here are judged by the harshest criteria of efficiency, standards which have not been changed in centuries. Every day I am expected to descend through the earthen tunnels and return with a hundred pounds of copper ore, not just to have the day counted against my sentence, but my very rations of food are subject to the scales as well.

As a newcomer to this pit, I was given no explanation of where the remaining veins are. It took me half a day simply to requisition the tools I would need and by then, the candles had run out from the supplies. I had little choice but to scrape and sift through the grit of the flooded lake for trinkets and baubles that could never suffice for the quota. The next day, when I was able to strike a candle aflame, I followed the other prisoners down the switchback paths of the mine until the sky was no larger than the broach of a woman's cloak above our heads. There, I found the very thinnest of ore traces, as if brass spiders had woven their webs through the stone.

When I did fill my basket and begin the ascent, a group of men fell upon me with their shovels and beat me until I could not stop them from taking the ore I had collected. For three days hence, I could hardly move from my cot just to relieve myself in my chamber pot. I could feel my body wasting away from hunger. Were it not for the mercy of my neighbor, I fear I would have never had the strength to work again. I chose another path next, and learned why those paths had been so long abandoned. Perhaps there is more ore to be found if a very many days of extraction are labored there, but they would be days without pay, without food.

The quartermaster took mercy on me and brought me beyond the fence. There, I performed the most slavish of menial labor and scraped the wasted wax from caps and lanterns so that it might be melted down again and new candles dipped. This work had kept my stomach filled, but it does not shorten my sentence. Every day that should bring me closer to my freedom again is wasted despite my toils. So, I beg of you to reconsider my place here. I am not a violent man. I have harmed nobody, spilled no blood. Not in the fiefs nor within this earthen prison. My crimes are of the tongue alone.

I will take any duty you see fit to give me, so long as the days count. I will crawl down and scrape the walls of the latrines if I must, but surely you can find use for a man of numbers? I am a learned man and speak several languages. I am trained in the mercantile arts as well as those of the sciences. Furthermore, I assert now as I did to the magistrate that although my musings were discovered to be in the domain of the dragon god, I reached them a priori! My travels have been to the central kingdoms. I have studied with the scholars of Giordana and deciphered scrolls from Aillesterra but I have not sold my soul to the mountain king. That I replicated their formula and rites is simply proof that the gods are true, that they are the world itself around us.

Oh, Mother Roma protect me.

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My dearest warden, you who can grant me even a degree of liberty, it may not be obvious to you what lengths I must take to simply write this plea. It is scribbled upon a water-stained scrap of paper the quartermaster thought unfit for official use. It is written with ink scraped out of old wells and ground anew. The process, as you might surmise, is not a quick one. My thoughts might be seeming to leap from one topic to the next, as I can only ink a few lines before my toils require me, or sleep demands its due.

Before I could finish this appeal there was but a simple storm. For not even an hour, droplets pattered down the great chasm into the mine and a somber silence gripped the other prisoners. It brought with it a melancholy. Of this, I thought little. I could smell the stone in such a thick aroma, these dismal walls almost seemed idyllic. I could imagine an enclave of hermit monks choosing to live in this sheltered pit where there was naught but their own thoughts and the solemn diligence of labor. I understood that the peace was because so many of my fellow inmates chose to rest hungry rather than carry their heavy burdens up the gravel slopes.

I thought this was an opportunity for myself. I could spy that my previous tormentors had not left their bunks and the rich tunnels would be available to me. I eschewed my work with the quartermaster against his heedings and descended into the darkness with the other recent arrivals in the mine. For a time, the ringing strikes of our pick-axes was companioned only by our labored breathing and the tumble and scrape of stone into baskets.

My nose warned me of the coming danger, but I only recognized it as a change in the wetness of the air. The constant drum of rain had been our echoing companion like the foraging of insects in the distance, but that noise had trailed off. At this time, I had more than half filled my day's basket and thought to rest at the canteen. The thought must have been the grace of the gods to send me back from that tunnel and to the light.

A growing roar of water began to echo through the depths, enough that every prisoner lifted his head and looked about at the shadows. There were questions of a collapse, but then my boot plunged into a puddle so deep it soaked through my laces. The icy shock was as if I had stepped into the heart of winter and I leapt back, my side pressing against the porous wall for support. Before I could pull my boot off and pour out the water, I felt the same chill upon my arm. Water was pouring into the mine through the very stone.

What happened next seemed to happen in a flash, as the build up was outside our candlelight and simply swept down upon us. A flood of water began pouring into the meandering tunnel and we were like ants in a hive. I still remember how the men called out to me to turn back. Their position was a bit higher than my own, the water had not yet reached them because of a rise. But there was no escape where they stood.

I threw myself against the tide, climbing on all four limbs like a beast. It was the weight of the ore that pressed me down despite the water, enough that I could climb and crawl even as the torrent pushed me down. A great curtain of water cascaded down from an ascendant tunnel, blocking the path that should have ventilated the air. It fell with such force I thought it would smother me beneath the surface, but as it was the source of the local flood the moment I pulled myself through it I was able to free myself.

Shivering from cold and panic, I crawled back to the main pit and shed my burden. Those poor men I left behind, I can still hear them shouting for me to come back, but what would have happened to me had I stayed? Even as I watched, the water swallowed the tunnel completely. When I composed myself, I ran for the overseers. A thinner man than myself was chosen to attempt to rescue them. On his first attempt, he had to swim back to the surface and reported that the water went further than expected. On his second, we had to haul him back, shivering and blue.

We still don't know if those men survived. I do now know why so many other prisoners chose hunger over labor this day.

This pit is no decent place. Not even for the most heinous of criminals. I would not condemn a patricide to this place. The lifts that lower us down should be called caskets, for we are all dead men digging our own graves. I yearn to see but a single man work off his sentence and ascend to the light. The only thing removed is stone.

I must leave this place before it kills me.