Sketcher's Row [Prototype]

Act I / Chapter II

Soal went to the mines.

He remembered having read about gold mines, coal mines and other varieties of quarries at the school. This one, however, differed in a way not already guaranteed by what he had witnessed thus far.

A horde of other "charks", animated innocents (primarily children) of infinite unique color palettes, textures, and heights, congregated before a dusty wall filled corner to corner with embossed text, washed over by more recent, strikingly crimson-hued inscriptions. A grave-looking ewyk interpreter read its contents to the crowd.

"The following documentation has been abridged to better suit your vocabulary skill level," she proclaimed. "'We will give each of you a thick hat, also called a helmet, a light box, also called a lantern, and a digging tool, also called a pickaxe. When you find a shiny stone, or sillingrock, come back and give it to us. Be safe, and be nice.' Now, start looking!"

The charks were lined up single-file, and individually received their "thick hats", "light boxes", and "digging tools". Soal himself, feeling mildly condescended to, already recognized these items. But more prescient thoughts swirled in his disproportionately large head, e.g. where was he? What is sillingrock? Who and what are the charks, if he, too, was one of these curious beings? Why did they have to mine for the ewyk? How could he return to the school?

What if he just asked? What could the harm be, Soal considered.

"Uh... ma'am...?" he approached the interpreter, surrounded by equally unenthusiastic ewyk, as the baffled charks dispersed to commence their thinly explained mission.

"Little one," she frowned, "it's hardly typical to shamble about begging for food until at least your fourth day."

"Wait... what?"

"...Not your concern. Anyway, what's your grievance?"

"Ah... there's somewhere I have to be right now, and I'm pretty sure I fell asleep during recess. Is it okay if you could do something to wake me up? I'm... what's the word... not dreaming... hallucinating."

"Well, around here," the interpreter suddenly grinned, "we're all hallucinating!" In moments the entire assemblage was guffawing irrationally.

Soal decided he was going to have to be in on this long, cruel joke; he turned around and set off for sillingrock, "digging tool" in hand.

The structure on which the ramshackle mines operated had decayed so much from its original state that it was nearly impossible to identify its purpose, let alone the engravings on its walls (ignoring the multiple layers of overgrown weeds obscuring them). That is, with the exception of one deeply refined phrase near a high-ceilinged roomful of charks:

QORKAS OH UNRELENTING QORKAS

A narrow shaft emptied daylight into the chamber; a flagpole thrust its way through it. Wavering shadows on the floor underneath it suggested a flag -- the flag of Qorkas -- was billowing.

"What's Qorkas?" Soal whispered to another chark in the shade.

"Qorkas is our flesh and blood," he responded before releasing a barrage of hacking coughs. "...Like it or not."

"But... what is Qorkas?"

"Who cares? We're charks," the fellow miner shrugged. "We wouldn't give a thing to learn about this blasted country. No more than we already have; no more than we already know."

Soal walked away.

He did eventually see one shard of sillingrock that day, and it was in the palm of that one boy. "Good job, fella," a fairly nondescript ewyk in the more well-illuminated and well-curated entrance of the cavernous ruin congratulated him for submitting the stone. It was itself an icy-looking and, upon close inspection, slightly sparkly fragment of bluish rock; nothing inherently precious by Soal's standards, but the generally desaturated atmosphere of the environment made simple color more welcome. "We'll get this over to Henrab. Maybe tomorrow he'll send you a reward. Look forward to it."

The chark received nothing to compensate for his discovery -- at least, not immediately. Supposedly, "Henrab" could change that.

When night fell on an unproductive day, ewyk guards blockaded the exits to the mines and ordered the deactivation of two of every three lanterns, to ensure a good night's sleep (on the paved floor) for those who wished to get some. All of the others were promised "higher prestige and recognition", should they unearth another sillingrock overnight. "If you stay awake and find a new shiny stone, seven days and nights in a row," the "hallucinating" interpreter from earlier spoke with echoing words, "Henrab will give you the best reward of them all."

Soal did not attempt to reach that milestone. In his hazy memory, the longest he was able to go without laughter-induced sleeping was, more or less, half a minute. In terms of "real" sleeping -- at night, in a bed -- there was only one foggy instance that came to mind, so distant that it was meaningless. He had never considered doing it consciously, but he ended up dozing off without knowing, and in the dreary morning a chark's hand was shaking him back to life. This hand did not belong to whoever was belting out these words:

"First one with a sillingrock gets a dish!"

A different chark, small and weak-looking, could be seen stumbling towards the exit guards. In an instant, she had been swamped by a stampede of desperate miners. The stone was crushed by the mob in the process, having been split into two hundred individual chunks on the floor. No "dish" appeared that morning.

"This happens every day," someone said. Soal couldn't see enough of their body in the shadows of the dawn to tell if they were a ewyk, a chark, or something else. All that he learned, in time, was that they were correct.

Every day at sunrise -- or, at the beginning of the day, considering Soal couldn't tell if the sun existed here at all -- a "dish" would be promised to the first one with a sillingrock. The lucky one in the ensuing surge to snatch it as their own would throw it to any given ewyk guard, and if they could catch it before another chark leapt to grab it, it would vanish into obsolescence; then, it was a similar race to see who could rip apart the largest share of the unclassified meat the thrower was gifted with. Given that sillingrock was rare -- having collected most of it in the mine's lifetime (about a year, so Soal had heard) -- any chark who could maintain possession of a stone that they had found in the first place was regarded as a champion of the "game", and would survive the day unstarved, if they were lucky. Most charks were not so fortunate, though.

And on the fourth straight day of menial mining, by which no contact with anyone, essential teaching, or general advancements had been made, Soal experienced something rarer yet than sillingrock: he felt something.

What could this be, he assessed. Boredom? Homesickness? Loneliness? Fear? Frustration? All of those? This can't be happening. Get me out of here!

Simultaneously, unbeknownst to him, someone else was undergoing the same conscious revelation.