Bloodsword: War of the Leaf

Chapter 3: Shaping the Blade

Tev sighed softly as he gazed out at the steady downpour that formed a gray curtain at the mouth of the small cave he and seven other humans clothed only in rags sat shivering in the chill of early morning.  It would almost be worth it to stand out in that cold rain just to wash the stench and filth off his body.  But since he was chained to the others and they didn't want to go, Tev knew it was an impossibility.  Sighing once more, he sat back against the cave's cold, clammy wall and stared into space, almost wishing for the overseer's bark would sound to drag them out of the cave's relative warmth and shelter into that self-same rain.

It was almost eight moons since being captured in the jungles surrounding the Mardish city of Mar Tolvanos and still Tev bore the marks of the brutal beating he received that night.  It shattered the bones of his face, pulped his features into an unrecognizable mass of pits and lumps and stove in a portion of his skull to put pressure on his brain, making through difficult, laborious and painful.  The beating also damaged muscles and tissue in his upper body, making any sort of lifting or digging motion excruciating.

That pain and the hesitation it fostered in doing the work assigned to him had earned the human not a few lashings which often left him unconscious and bleeding.  And more often the guards applied a few more lashes with their thick, leather whips as he lay on the ground before dumping his broken body in an out of the way place.  When he somehow regained consciousness after laying exposed to the elements for days, they simply dragged him back to work.

And so it went, over and over again, for eight moons: beaten until loss of consciousness, a time to recover then back to work.  The food, poor and insect-ridden at the best of times, along with the filthy and diseased water did nothing to help the miners' broken bodies to heal and many died within a moon of coming to the deadly Troska Mines.

Perched on a rocky escarpment on the western most portion of the Skull Peninsula which jutted out into the Sea of Winds, the Troska Iron Mines were infamous throughout Lasis'Nar for their ability to brutally kill, both man and elf, and had done so for almost three hundred years.  And central to Troska's ability to slay mortal creatures was the mine's layout.

First was the broad, central bore that went straight down into the living rock of the peninsula almost a full league.  From the bore numerous horizontal shafts radiated in every direction, some running two or three leagues themselves into the darkness, the cold, stinking depths illuminated only by the feeble glow of oil lamps set at ten pace intervals.

The horizontal shafts were barely man-high, forcing the slave-miners to crouch as they shuffled down the tunnels, pushing rickety wooden ore carts on crude wheels.  Often cross tunnels connected the main shafts, the whole forming a vast labyrinth only the surviving miners truly knew.

The shafts that either dead-ended without finding ore or had collapsed because of flooding caused by the almost continual rains that poured down the massive pit in the ground became refuge for the miners, which were chained into gangs of eight to make sure none tried to escape.  And just as often they served as the final resting place for those taking shelter there as the miners died in the midst of their miserable sleep or even more violently as the shaft collapsed on top of them.

On this miserable killing ground Tev Bloodsword had somehow managed to survive.  Not for one moon, nor two, but eight.  And in doing so he had become somewhat of a hero and a source of inspiration to the other slaves.  If he could survive, broken and crippled as he was, then so could they, despite all the forces arrayed against their continued existence.  Somehow he had avoided death in five shaft collapses, eight rock falls, a score of illnesses and beatings and other torments too numerous to mention.

Grimacing, the stocky overseer re-coiled his bullwhip and tied it to his belt before pulling his oiled cloak more tightly about himself.  Bracing against the inevitable chill, he then stepped out of his sturdy shack, which was warmed and lit by a small brazier.  He braced for good reason: as soon as he stepped out from beneath the shack's overhanging roof the driving rain hit him with enough force that he grunted as if physically struck.  Pausing to acclimatize himself to the heavy downpour, the overseer grimly pushed out into the rain, eyes focused on the ladder down into the wide bowl dug into the ground around the entrance of the primary horizontal shaft.