The Backbreaker. The Chain Keeper. The Merchant of Bones. I'm known by many names down here in the darkness. The winding caverns of my lair bored into rock not by machine, or even beast, but the grime-encrusted hands of men clasping splintering wooden picks. These mines run deep. Squalid, narrow and damp, their craggy walls glisten with a sweat that permeates the air like a thick mist. It doesn't matter that no sun nor heat ever worms its way into this forbidding place, illuminated only by flickering firelight of torches clamped to the bare rock by rusting iron brackets; the graft is so hard no worker fails to leave without a sodden sheen across their filth-ridden brow. Not if I can help it, at least.
To them, I'm like a fable. A ghost story taken true form. A demon or a bad omen haunting their days. To those above ground though, I'm known by a different name: the foreman. The work is tough, and my masters demanding. But I find I'm delivering more of what they need every day, and I'm praised for it, so I push my drones harder, and become more beast than man in their eyes. The harder I push, the more I become a dread to the workers, but the more they dread me, the happier my masters are.
The dread also serves more purpose. The dread is needed. Without their fear of me, the mines would never deliver all of what my masters desire. Without the Merchant of Bones, our entire world could fall apart. Then where would we be? There is nothing in this bitter, ice-encrusted corner of the world but the work of the mines. No fjords to fish, no fields to till, no timber to chop. I am the whetstone that grinds at the axe that is my home; without me, it would grow dull and lifeless. Without me working these dogs until their hands shook and the jagged floor of the mines ran with their dribbling vomit, the masters would leave, and the world would stop turning.
***
Emerging from the mines, after the sun has already fallen, bright moonlight clutches the chill air, rebounding off a great and familiar cliff face that looms behind me, gently bathing the world below in a soft blue light.
I take in a breath so crisp and clean I cough it straight back out again. I stay beneath the stony surface of my mine so long that when I leave it, I feel as if the space that has opened up around me is a maw threatening to swallow me whole. This open world always seems alien to me, despite the fact I walk the same path every night and every morning. I might be first into the mine and last out, but it is not my home, a place I am eager to get back to now. A small house on the edge of town; far from people, far the from noise, tight and narrow and quiet, my home is just how I like it. I rush my way up the crest that lays between mining pit and the cityscape, desperate for the clutching embrace of walls. The ground beneath my feet is a frozen slurry of snow met with churned up mud from the days work in the yard.
Tomorrow is going to be different sort of day. Tomorrow I will find myself wandering the stone-flagged streets of the city that I swiftly press my way towards, but this time while the sun still hangs in the sky. I've been summoned. Called up by my masters to attend a public gathering that will discuss what they label 'a growing concern' amongst the community about the rigorous nature of our mining. As a rarity, I am the one who experiences that sense dread usually preserved for my workers. Much of the city is tightly packed in, like my mine shafts, which I can find some comfort in, but I'll be forced to stand in the open courtyard of the town square. My prayers of the past few days have been that I am not required to stand there for long. I tell myself they shouldn't keep me, my work is too important to be standing around serving their beleaguered politics. At least I am not needed to speak, which is good for I have no mind for speaking; I communicate better with a chain in hand. I leave words to smaller men.
***
Even as the sun bears down from its place in the cloudless sky, the sheets of snow blanketing the roofs of the tightly-packed greystone houses does not melt. The snow never melts here, and the frost on my breath so heavy it sinks shows exactly why. Even bound up in thick furs, like all the gaunt and dreary pale faces I pass, I feel the cold biting at me. The layers make every man and woman look wide and spry, but beneath them, there is little meat on anyone's bones; so scarce and coveted is food here. Well, my bones are covered in more than most. I am the foreman after all. And if I didn't have my muscles to lift my chain, the workers would wain, the masters would lose interest, the money wouldn't flow, and there would be even less food for the hungry. Every eye that falls upon me is sharp and glaring. I feel the hatred rise off them like the smoke billowing from every chimney across the tangled mess of houses that make up this meandering city. Hatred, and hunger for the food they know I'm treated to above them. But they shouldn't hate me. Without me, they'd all be buried under the snow. Many already were, of course, because of me. More, I mean. More would be buried.
