“It’s been a while since we had a rock slide where anyone was around,” he told me, shouting a bit louder as we made our way further into the tunnel and the sounds of metal on stone began to ring out around us. “But the entirety of the Underground is full of long forgotten tunnels which collapse from time to time, and level ten has more than most.”
I plopped the hat onto my head with a frown and turned to watch the man nearest me as he paused in his back-breaking labor to wipe the sweat from his brow. In doing so, he managed to smear grime all over his face as well as his hands but didn't seem to notice as he continued on.
“Everyone down here has completed at least the second Trial,” Tiberius was saying, walking onward and leaving me with no choice but to follow, “or they descend from someone who did. They need the Blessing of enhanced eyesight to work well down here in the dark. It’s more efficient to populate level ten withthose who are naturally capable of the work than it is to spare more electricity to light the place up.”
I nodded but hesitated, my eyebrows pulling together in confusion. Something he'd said wasn’t right.
“What would it matter if they descended from someone with the Blessing?” I asked, perplexed. “Blessings don’t get passed on.”
Tiberius turned back to face me momentarily, his lips set in a frown.
“Things are different down here, Adrian,” he reminded me, softly. “Something about making the crossing, whether you do it through the Culling or the Betrayal, cements the Blessings within you. It makes them a permanent part of you. And you pass them on. At least, in part. Usually.”
I nodded, though I didn’t quite understand how such a thing could be possible or the enormity of the implications if it were. Instead, I turned my attention back to the men and women working in the mines. We were passing row after row of them now and I couldn't help but watch in awe as they heaved their pickaxes into the air behind them and dropped them firmly onto the stone below. And most of it was stone, I noticed. A dark, coarse stone I'd identified as being a major part of most construction down here in the Underground.
As we walked further into the mines, however, that changed. Miners here exchanged their pickaxes for chisels and worked hard to extricate glittering jewels from where they lay embedded into rock that was nearly black. Almost every color of the rainbow shimmered from the stone but I stepped forward and laid my hand on a jagged emerald about the size of my fist and frowned. How many of these jewels had I seen dangling from the ears, necks, and wrists of the Upper Ringers? How many gowns had I worn in my short time among them in which they'd been embedded?
I looked down the row at the miners working soundlessly, dirty faces scrunched in expressions ofhard setdetermination. For most of them, this was the only life they'd ever known. Living ten levels below ground, spending day after day in backbreaking manual labor, never seeing the sun, never breathing fresh air.
I ripped my hand away from the jewel.
“Most of the jewels get sent up to luxury goods,” Tiberius explained. He breezed past the workers extracting the gems to move further into the mines where it became even darker than it had been. “Some go to textiles to be woven into gowns and such but that’s mostly the smaller shards and pieces that can't be made into jewelry. Further down here in the mines, we use heavier equipment to extract metals like iron and even silver and gold. Sometimes even—”
“How are you still alive?” I blurted.
It was the question I’d determined to ask him ever since I’d had the opportunity to get a good night’s sleep and realized how odd it was that a man who'd failed the tenth Trial over a thousand years ago was alive and well enough to show me around the entirety of the Underground, taking me under his wing as if he were my mentor of some sort.
Tiberius slowed to a stop. He remained facing away from me for a moment before he turned to look at me in a darkened path between sections of the mine where no one worked. A few passed by on their way from one place to another but they didn't spare us a glance.
“I wondered when you might get around to asking me that,” he muttered. His attempt at humor fell flat, due largely to the subject matter and the placid frown that remained on his face.
I just waited for an answer.
“I know you think you failed the tenth Trial, Adrian—”
“I did,” I replied.
“There's no way to fail the tenth Trial. Getting there is the success in and of itself. All you had to do was walk across a bridge, right? Then the rings took it from there. All the tenth Trial does is decide who comes here.”
I blinked at him, stunned.
“We can talk about them,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper as I fought the urge to reach up to my forehead where the mark of my Oath had once been branded. It was gone now. Nothing but smooth skin remained in its wake.
His lips slanted into a deeper frown. His eyes took on new meaning as he responded.
“I told you things were different down here,” he said. “The Oath no longer applies but our Blessings are a part of us. You received one from the Tenth.”
My brow furrowed as I glanced down at the tenth band around the elbow of my left arm. It was different, thinner than all the rest. I'd assumed that meant it was a mark of my failure, a mark which doomed me to a life in the Underground, marked me as a Fallen.
“Immortality,” Tiberius said and my gaze snapped back to his. “That’s the so-called gift we're given for the Tenth. The curse of living forever.”
I staggered back, blinking at him in the darkness.I must have misheard him, or he was insane.
“That’s not possible,” I shook my head.
Forever. I couldn’t even grasp the concept of it. Living forever. There was a natural progression to life, a timeline we’d all accepted as a part of our genetic code. We were born, we lived, and then we died. Nothing else was guaranteed, nothing else was promised. Just life and then death. Always death. Who could suspend death itself? The answer came to me immediately. Only the gods.
“How else am I here, Adrian?” he asked. “How else would I be talking to you now?”
