Despair swept over Carlos, sinking icy tendrils of panic that wrapped themselves around him in their chilly maddening embrace. He found himself uncomfortably shackled, both at the wrists and ankles. Large iron chains snaked across the floor, binding him on both sides to the other unlucky men who shared his fate. Although his vision was still enveloped in half-darkness (the light of the cheap alchemic lamps casting a bluish tinge and slightly illuminating the woven pattern of the rough and cheap burlap sap for which his head had been unceremoniously stuffed inside) he was aware of his new comrades. Both their smells and their intermittent jostling made him painfully aware of their presence. He could tell by the rustling and jangling of the chains as they rose and fell with the breaths and shifting movements of the prisoners, that three other companions were sharing his fate.

“They didn’t recognize me” The thought reverberated through his skull, consuming his every thought. He tried to escape it, the reality of the situation, the gravity of what had happened, yet those icy tendrils of panic only squeezed harder the more he tried to escape from the rising and inescapable feelings of doubt and despair. It had all been for nothing, the robberies on the road, the months forced in seclusion, the countless nights of hunger and starvation, all of these had led to this moment.

“How could they have not recognized me?” Carlos shivered as an icy wind raked its talons across his bare chest, bitterly cutting straight through the meager and overly worn cotton of his trousers. His back was pressed against a rough and freezing surface which he recognized as rough-cut granite. Cold and domineering, the granite wall seemed to greedily sap at what little warmth he had left. To his left, he heard a man sneeze, the force of it jerking the taught chains for which they were linked. This caused the overly secured shackles to tighten against his leg, sending a sharp pain in his ankle and up to his leg. He felt a warm and wet line trickle from the part of his ankle that the shackle had tightened against.

Carlos tried and failed to stifle a yell, emitting instead a low suppressed whimper that encapsulated all the misery and misfortune since the day he had accepted what he had previously hoped would be the biggest score of his career. “How could it have come to this,” he thought. The sentiments of frustration welled up in him, echoing the same emotion repeatedly through slightly different thoughts. The rage he felt when he first awoke had long since subsided, eroded by the forces of fear, captivity, discomfort, and cold. That rage now gave way to an unsettling, apathetic smolder of panic and defeat that seemed to suckle away at the last ounces of hope that had supported him through the trials for which he had endured on his way Godsprings.

That hope, a vision of a future where he no longer had to fight for survival, a future where he would be free to thrive, to fight for the changes to the broken and imbalanced system of “justice” he had dreamed of since his youth now lay in tatters.

Carlos’ shivers intensified, increasing from intermittent shakes to full-on convulsions, rattling his teeth together like the keys of a secretariats type-machine documenting in unending succession the records of a high court. His mind began to slip away from the biting sting of the cold of that dark half-illuminated place and into the numbness of delirium.

Fever. He knew that was what was now upon him. If he could weather its effects, he might survive it. But what then. What would Carlos be surviving for? The cycle of despair had begun. He knew that if he wasn’t careful, these thoughts would drown him. They would pull him deeper and deeper towards the unending darkness of their abyss they way a great vortex would pull a ship towards its center, before ripping it with unyielding force towards its watery depths. It would claim his clarity and self, leaving only the husk of his body behind.

He needed a purpose, a reason to keep fighting. More than that he needed something to keep him from falling asleep. He knew if he let go and succumbed to the fever dreams, he might never awaken. Whether it was from the fever or out of a part of him that desired survival, he was unsure. Regardless, and against the better parts of reason which in that dreary place had long since abandoned him, he uttered aloud a whisper.

“Who are you” the words hung in the air, clinging to the atmosphere like the way smoke clung to, rose, then filled a room. Here there was no ventilation for it to escape and so, instead, it penetrated the silence and introspection that had previously dominated the enclosure for which these captives found themselves. The desperation of the sentiment proved infectious, too overbearing to ignore, and so as if with a great deal of effort there squeaked out a reply from Carlos’ left side.

“Elandris, my name it’s Elandris” the voice from which the words sputtered was gruff gritty, and low. It carried with it the weight of many years of toil, tribulations, and tragedy. Despite the surety of the tone and the confidence in which they were spoken, Carlos noticed a slight wavering stutter to them and realized that this elderly man must be as frozen as himself.

These words and the humanity that seemed to emanate from them had a sort of tonic effect on him, pulling him back, if for a moment, from the brink of his internal abyss. The simplicity of the response was honeying to him, despite the misfortune for which he now found himself, if nothing else he was just glad to not be alone. The response of that old man symbolized a glimmer of hope for this. If he could make a connection, reach out, and find support, he could once again find a reason to persist.

But this hope was fleeting, perhaps even artificial. A desperate last attempt to cling to anything that might provide him with hope. Deep down Carlos knew there wasn’t any, and so he shoved himself away from the looming spiral of all-encompassing hopelessness and clung instead to this false hope of human connection.

Carlos knew what awaited him down here, within the mines of the Abino canyon complex. He had heard the rumors in every inn and tavern since he had crossed the desolate sands of the Khalmuki. Rumors of the slave gangs of the Godsprings mines and how soulless these men were.

They were inhuman, the stories had said, bound with blood magic and dominated by the infernal clockwork of the corporate Djinns. Those slaves became walking husks, half-humans who were mutated into hulking mountains of meat, left to spend their days extracting the minerals, coal, and blessed water that made the Abino canyons so profitable.

Elandris spoke again, the words poured out of him now in a torrent of desperation to be heard and singed with the bitter flavor of past nostalgia. “I was once a soldier of the Arena, captured as a boy on the Isle of Dalm. I have rarely known freedom. Here I find myself trapped once again. I have once tasted of freedom, hard-won through a lifetime of blood and death in the Arenas. Yet, fate it seems is a cruel mistress. Here chained to other men, it seems I’m destined for death in slavery. A death rooted much like the days of my youth. From that which I came, must I know return”

He paused only to take a deep gasping breath before the unending vomit of wounds spewed out once again. “My story is long and hopeless, but I pray that you will listen to it. I do not fear death, not a physical one anyway, but I need to be remembered even if it's nothing but an illusion. I must know that others will remember my life, that all the death, my sins, and triumphs, will be remembered even just for a moment. Please” he begged; his voice choked with the raw emotions of panic.

Although Carlos couldn’t see him, he could imagine the pain contorted on Elandris’s elderly face. He thought that despite his relative youth, that his face likely contorted in similar wrinkles and furrows, the years as a vagrant in pursuit of this score had undoubtedly left him weathered.

Before Elandris could continue, however, a door swung open with a thundering crash and the bag was painfully wretched from Carlos’s head in one fluid, forceful tug. Despite the dimness of the alchemical lights, their glare still managed to blind him momentarily. He blinked to clear the pain and was faced with the image of his captors and the reality of his surroundings.